Soviet space dogs, the dog perspective

You'll be working on an pre-processed sample of the USSR space dogs database compiled by Duncan Geere and pre-loaded for you as space_dogs_df. Each of the 42 rows in this dataset represents a test rocket launch which had one or two very brave dogs on board.

Your goal is to reshape this dataset so that for each launch, each dog has a row.

The challenge is that in the column headers (name_1, name_2, gender_1, and gender_2), the part before the _ separator can point to two different variables (name and gender), while the second part always points to the dog ID (1^st or 2^nd dog).

Laika

Laika, the first animal to orbit Earth in 1957

This exercise is part of the course

Reshaping Data with tidyr

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Exercise instructions

As the first argument to pivot_longer(), pass the columns to pivot (name_1, name_2, gender_1, and gender_2).
Complete the names_to argument so that the first part of the column headers are reused.
Make sure NA values are dropped since not all rockets had two dogs.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

space_dogs_df %>% 
  pivot_longer(
    # Add the columns to pivot
    ___,
    names_sep = "_",
    # Complete the names_to argument to re-use the first part of the column headers
    names_to = c(___,  "dog_id"),
    # Make sure NA values are dropped
    ___
  )

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