Aurora 30-minute forecast, https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/aurora-30-minute-forecast
Time
dilation calculator, https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/time-dilation
Asteroid
and Meteor exploration � see Appendix
Comet
exploration � see Appendix
Jupiter
exploration � see Appendix
Mercury
exploration � See Appendix
Mars exploration
� see Appendix
Moon exploration
� see Appendix
Neptune
exploration � see Appendix
Pluto
exploration� -see Appendix
Saturn
exploration � see Appendix
Sun exploration
� see Appendix
Uranus
exploration � see Appendix
Venus
exploration � see Appendix
2 September 2022, Frank Drake,
who developed the Drake equation for estimating the number of alien
civilisations in the Milky Way, died aged 92.
25 December 2021, The James Webb Space Telescope was launched
form French Guiana.
1 December 2019, The radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, was
wrecked when cables supporting the receiver above its dish snapped..
14 March 2018, The world famous astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking,
died of motor neurone disease, aged 76 (born 8 January 1942). He was famous for
his work on Black Holes, and his book A
Brief History of Time.
14 September 2015, Gravity
waves generated by a collision between two Black Holes were detected by
interferometers at the LIGO facility in the US.
1 November 2012, NASA detected the light from the very first stars
to exist in the Universe.
26 August 2012, Neil Armstrong died.
25 August 2012, Voyager I
became the first man-made object to leave the solar system.
24 June 2012, Three Chinese astronauts successfully docked with
an orbiting module, making China the 3rd country to accomplish
this mission.
21 July 2011, The Space Shuttle Atlantis
landed at Kennedy Space Centre, concluding the Space Shuttle Programme.
8 July 2011, After making
134 missions, the space shuttle Atlantis
made the final space shuttle fight.
16 December 2009, Astronomers reported the discovery of an exoplanet
where liquid water might exist.
10 February 2009, A Russian and an American satellite collided,
creating large amounts of space debris.
9 December 2008,
Scientists confirmed the existence of a Black Hole at the centre of the Milky
Way.
28 September 2008, Space X launched the first private satellite,
Falcon I, into orbit.
2007, The first FRB, or Fast Radio Burst, was observed. The mechanism of
their origin remains uncertain.
9 August 2006, James van Allen,
physicist who discovered radiation belts around the Earth, died (born 7
September 1914)
4 July 2006, The shuttle
Discovery launched from Florida's Kennedy Space Centre, bound for
the International Space Station with 7 astronauts aboard
3 November 2005, Sagittarius A, a compact radio source at the
centre of the Milky Way, is proved to be a supermassive black hole.
12 October 2005, The second Chinese space flight, Shenzhou 6, was launched, taking Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng
into orbit for 5 days.
9 August 2005, The space shuttle Discovery landed in the US,
after taking off on 26 July 2005.
29 July 2005, Astronomers claimed to
have discovered a planet beyond Pluto and larger than Pluto in the outer solar
system. It was provisionally named 2003 UB313.
26 July 2005, The US launched its first space shuttle mission since the
Columbia broke up on re-entry in early 2003.
5 November 2003, NASA announced that the
space probe Voyager 1, launched in 9/1977, had now reached the edge of the
Solar System, the point where the solar winds ceased to be detectable.� It was now over 13 billion kilometres from
Earth.
1 February 2003, The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over
Texas on re-entering the earth�s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on
board.
16 January 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia took off; it disintegrated 16
days later on re-entry to the Earth�s atmosphere.
1 March 2002, The Hubble Space Telescope was overhauled.
28 April 2001, Billionaire businessman Denis Tito
became the world�s first space tourist,
on board a Soyuz supply mission. He was in space for 8 days, paying US$ 20
million.
23 March 2001, The abandoned Russian space station Mir crashed back to Earth, falling into
the Pacific Ocean. It had been launched in 1986 and had long exceeded its
expected operational lifetime.
2 November 2000, The first crew of the International Space Station � 2
Russians and an American � arrived there on a Russian spacecraft. They would
stay for 4 months.
31 October 2000. One astronaut and two cosmonauts became the first
inhabitants of the International Space
Station.
11 October 2000, The 100th flight of the Space Shuttle.
16 July 2000, The
European Space Agency launched a space probe to research the Earth�s
magnetosphere.
1999,
The Chandra X-Ray observatory was launched.
22 November 1999, China
launched a manned spacecraft.
20 November 1998, The first
launch of the components for the International Space Station.
29 October 1998, John Glenn,
US astronaut, returned to space.
24 October 1998, The USA
launched the Deep Space ion propulsion space probe.
8 January 1998, Scientists
announced that the expansion rate of the universe was increasing.
5 May 1997, The USA
launched the Iridium satellites, for global communications.
31 March 1997. The Pioneer space probe ended its useful
life 6 billion miles from Earth.
12 February 1997, Japan
launched the Haruka satellite, for radio astronomy observations.
20 December 1996, Carl Sagan, astronomer, died.
19 September 1996. The US spacecraft Atlantis docked with
the Russian space station Mir.
4 June 1996, The European Space Agency�s �565 million Ariane 5 rocket exploded
during lift off.
17 February 1996, The USA
launched the NEAR space probe, to rendezvous with an asteroid.
17 November 1995, The
European Space Agency launched ISO, an Infared space observatory.
6 October 1995, Michael
Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the discovery
of the first extra-solar planet, 51 Pegasi b.
29 June 1995, The space shuttle Columbia docked for the first
time with the Russian Mir space station.
22 March 1995, Valeri Polyakov returned to earth from the
longest stay in space by a human, 437 days, 18 hours.
8 January 1994, Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov left for the Mir
Space Station. He remained there until 22 March 1985, a record 437 days in
space.
18 December 1993, The first corrected images from the Hubble
Telescope were taken.
10 December 1993. The Hubble telescope was successfully repaired in space
by Shuttle astronauts. Its mirror had been slightly misshapen, blurring its
vision of deep space. The Shuttle landed safely on 13 December 1993.
2 December 1993. The Space Shuttle Endeavour was launched on a mission to
repair flaws in the Hubble Space Telescope.
28 March 1993, Type II supernova detected in M81.
19 January 1993 The
space shuttle Endeavour landed after a 6-day mission.
10 August 1992, The European Space Agency launched Topex/Poseidon,
a geodetic mapping satellite.
23 April 1992, Scientists in the USA announced the discovery of
�ripples� in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation of the universe. This
helped account for the present-day uneven distribution of matter in the Universe.
22 January 1992, Roberta Bondar became the first Canadian woman
in space, also the first neurologist. She spent 8 days on the International
Space Station, orbiting the Earth 129 times.
19 May 1991, Helen Sharman,
the first Briton in space, lifted off with two Soviet astronauts to join up
with the Soviet Mir space station.
27 June 1990, Scientists admitted that the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in April 1990, had a
wrongly-shaped mirror.
25 April 1990. The Hubble
Space telescope was launched from the Space Shuttle �Discovery�.
5 April 1990, The USA made the first airborne satellite launch.
30 March 1991, The USSR launched Almaz-1, a survey satellite.
18 January 1989, Astronomers discovered a pulsar in the remnants of
Supernova 1987A.
15 November 1988, The USSR launched an unmanned space shuttle, Buran.
29 September 1988, NASA recommenced space flights, grounded after the
Challenger disaster.
9 April 1988, The landmark work A Brief History of Time was published by Stephen Hawking.
23 February 1987, A tank full of 7,000 tons of ultrapure water
detected a flash of neutrinos at the same time as a supernova was seen, proving
the theory that supernovae collapsed into neutron stars.
5 February 1987, Japan launched the Astro-C satellite to
observe neutron stars and Black Holes, using X rays and gamma rays.
13 March 1986, The Russian spacecraft Soyuz T15 made the first
ferry between space stations.
19 February 1986, The USSR launched the Mir space station.
28 January 1986. The US space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after take-off on its 10th
flight, killing 7 astronauts. 90 seconds after blast off from Cape Canaveral,
and nine miles up. An �O� ring failed due to the extreme and unseasonal cold;
ice had to be chipped from the shuttle before take-off. The fuel tanks
containing liquid hydrogen and oxygen ignited. Rescue ships reached the crash
site a few miles offshore but were held up for an hour due to the rain of
burning debris. There were five men and two woman on board, including a
schoolteacher, Mrs Christa McAutcliffe. It was President Reagan�s idea to send
a schoolteacher into space, and she won the competition from over 11,000
applicants. Her husband and two children were amongst the thousands of
spectators. The space shuttle fleet was grounded for
three years, and this disaster was a factor in the termination of the shuttle
programme in 2011.
8 November 1984, The USA
retrieved a satellite from space.
14 October 1984, Martin Ryle, English radio astronomer, died aged
66.
28 August 1984, The space shuttle Discovery
made its maiden flight.
25 July 1984, Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to
walk in space.
7 April 1984, The space shuttle Challenger
was launched on its 5th mission.
7 February 1984, Bruce McCandless made the first space walk
without an attachment to the spacecraft, from the space shuttle Challenger.
3 February 1984, The space shuttle Challenger
was launched on its 4th mission.
30 August 1983, The third flight by the Challenger space shuttle.
13 June 1983. The US spacecraft Pioneer 1 became the first man-made object to leave the Solar
System.
7 April 1983, Don Peterson and Story Musgrave performed the
first space walk from the Space Shuttle.
4 April 1983, The space shuttle Challenger
was launched.
26 January 1983, IRAS, the Infra-Red Astronomy Satellite,
was launched. It observed astronomical phenomena from bodies too cool to emit
visible light. It stopped functioning on 22 November 1983.
27 June 1982, The US space shuttle Columbia
made its fourth flight.
22 March 1982. The US space shuttle Columbia
made its third flight.
12 November 1981, The US Space Shuttle Columbia became the first
space vehicle to make a second trip.
14 April 1981, The space shuttle Columbia landed at
Edwards Air Force base, California, after 2 days in space.
12 April 1981. The USA launched its first space shuttle, Columbia, from Cape Canaveral,
crewed by Robert Crippen and
John Young.
18 July 1980,
India launched a satellite, Rohini.
11 July 1979. America�s Skylab
I fell to earth after 34,981 orbits in six years. It had been launched on
14 May 1973.� Debris landed in Australia.
24 January 1978, A Soviet nuclear-powered satellite, Cosmos
954, crashed in north-western Canada, spilling radioactive debris. The Canadian
government presented Moscow with a 6 billion dollar bill for the clean-up, of
which Moscow eventually paid half.
18 February 1977, The Space Shuttle Enterprise went on its maiden �flight� on the top of a Boeing 747
plane.
9 January 1976, Rupert Wildt, German-US astronomer, died in
New Orleans., USA.
17 July 1975. The crews of Apollo 18 (USA) and Soyuz 19
(USSR) visited each other�s capsules in the first such joint space venture
between the two countries. They shook hands 140 miles over the south coast of
Britain.� The Apollo 18 mission was reckoned to have cost US$ 500 million, and
the expense of this put an end to the Apollo project.
15 July 1975, Apollo 18 was launched, crewed by Vance Brand,
Thomas
Stafford, and Donald Slayton.
16 November 1974, The Arecibo radio telescope beamed a message towards the
M13 star cluster encoding information about mankind, in case any aliens are
there to receive it.
19 July 1974, The Soviet space probe Soyuz
14 returned safely to Earth.
8 February 1974, America�s final Skylab mission ended after 84 days, as Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson,
and William
Pogue returned to Earth.
24 December 1973, Dutch-US astronomer Kuiper died.
16 November 1973, The third Skylab mission was launched, on
an 84-day mission.
14 May 1973. The US put Skylab I into orbit. It
eventually returned to earth on 11 July 1979 after 34,981 orbits.
7 March 1973, Comet Kohoutek was discovered by Czech astronomer Lubos Kohoutek.
20 October 1972, Harlow Shapley, US astronomer, died in
Boulder, Colorado.
5 January 1972, President Nixon authorised a US$ 5 � billion space shuttle
programme.
30 June 1971. The USSR spacecraft Soyuz 11 returned to earth but the 3 cosmonauts were found dead in
their seats.
24 April 1971 The Russian spacecraft Soyuz 10 linked up
with the orbiting Salyut space station.
19 April 1971, The Soviet Union launched the world�s first space
station, Salyut 1.
1970,
The first telescope at the Mauna Kea observatory, Hawaii, was installed.
24 April 1970, China launched its first satellite.
11 February 1970, Japan launched its first Earth satellite.
18 May 1969, Apollo 10 was launched, crewed by Thomas Stafford,
John Young,
and Eugene
Cernan.
3 March 1969, Apollo 9
was launched, manned by James McDivitt, David Scott, and Russell
Schweickart.
1968, US physicist John Wheeler
(1911 � 2008) proposed what he called �Black Holes�; stars so massive not even
light could escape from them (see 1784). Karl Schwarzchild (1873 � 1916) also worked on
this theory.
22 October 1968, Apollo
7, having orbited the Earth 163 times, splashed down safely in the Atlantic
Ocean,
11 October 1968, The USA�s Apollo 7 spacecraft was launched flawlessly by its 700 ton Saturn
1B rocket and began 10 days and 21 hours in space.� It was crewed by Walter Schirra, Don Eiselle
and Walter
Cunningham.
27 March 1968. Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space in 1961,
was killed in a plane crash near Moscow, on a routine training flight.
28 November 1967, The first pulsar
was discovered by Susan Burnell (born 1943), a radio astronomer
at Cambridge, England.
The regular radio pulses were initially thought to be signals from intelligent
aliens.
10 October 1967, The Outer Space Treaty came into effect, detailing guidelines for the
exploration of outer space and banning the stationing of weapons of mass
destruction there. It stated that no other planet or moon could be claimed by
any one nation or company.
24 April 1967. The first space casualty occurred when Vladimir
Komarov was killed as the Russian spacecraft Soyuz I crashed
to earth after leaving orbit. It came to Earth on the steppes of Orenburg.
27 January 1967, Fire broke out on the spacecraft Apollo I during ground tests at Cape Kennedy.
Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee were killed. Normally
fire-resistant plastics ignited in the pure oxygen used by the astronauts.
11 November 1966, Final
mission of the Gemini series. James
A Lovell and Edwin
E Aldrin completed 5 hours of extra-vehicular activity.
18 July 1966, The US
launched the Gemini 10 spacecraft, crewed by John Young and Michael
Collins.
17 March 1966. US astronauts docked in space.
3 June 1966, Gemini 9
was launched, with 2 astronauts on board.
15 March 1966, The US spacecraft Gemini 8 was launched, with Neil Armstrong and David Scott.
1965, Technicians working for
the Bell Telephone Company reported radio interference at 3.2 cm wavelength
which they initially blamed on birds. In fact the radiation was from space and
confirmed the Big Bang Theory, which had first been proposed by the Belgian
astronomer Georges
Lemaitre in 1927. In fact US astronomer Robert Dicke had calculated the
expected frequency of this radiation a year earlier in 1964, as the �afterglow�
of the Big Bang.
4 December 1965, The US spacecraft Gemini 7 was
launched, crewed by Frank Borman and James Lovell.
26 November 1965, France launched a satellite, A-1 Asterix.
21 August 1965, The US launched the spacecraft Gemini 5,
crewed by Gordon
Cooper and Charles Conrad. It orbited the Earth for 8 days before a safe splashdown in the
Atlantic.
3 June 1965, Gemini IV was launched, crewed by James McDivitt
and Edward
White. During the flight, Edward H White� became the first man to walk in space, for 20
minutes.
6 April 1965, The US launched Early Bird, a weather satellite,
23 March 1965, US
spacecraft Gemini I was launched, crewed by Virgil Grissom and John Young.
18 March 1965. The first
walk in space, lasting about 10 minutes,
was made by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei
Leonov, from the spaceship Voskhod 2.
19 January 1965, The
unmanned Gemini 2 was launched on a
suborbital test of various spacecraft systems, in preparation for the first US mission to
send two astronauts into space.
1964,
US astronomer Robert Dicke
proposed that space should contain the �afterglow� of the Big bang, in the form
of radio waves. In 1965 this radiation was picked up, at a frequency of 3.2 cm,
by the Bell Telephone Company; they
initially attributed such radio waves to interference by birds.
12 October 1964. Russia launched the first three man space
ship.
5 June 1964, The first
British space flight, as the Blue Streak
rocket took off from Woomera in Australia.
13 December 1963, The UN approved Resolution 1962 (XVIII), The Declaration of Legal Principles Governing the Activities of States
in the Exploration and Uses of Outer Space, the first of five declarations
governing the nations' exploration of outer space. Among the nine principles
contained in the declaration were that no nation could lay claim to sovereignty
of any portion of space or celestial bodies, but that each nation would have
jurisdiction over its own objects in outer space regardless of where they
returned to Earth, and that exploration would be "in the interests of all
mankind" and nations would regard astronauts as �envoys of mankind� to be
rendered aid in the event of an emergency, regardless of nationality.
2 July 1963, Seth Barnes Nicholson,
US astronomer, died in Los Angeles, California.
17 June 1963, The USSR achieved the first link-up of two
spacecraft in space. Valentina Tereshkova (26) aboard the Vostok 6 rocket met with Valery Bykovsky
(28) who had been orbiting Earth aboard Vostok 5 for two days. Crowds celebrated
in the streets of Moscow.
16 June 1963. Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the
first woman to travel into space. She was born to a peasant family in
Maslennikovo, Russia, in 1937, and made her first parachute jump aged 22 with a
local aviation club. Her enthusiasm for skydiving brought her to the attention
of the soviet space programme, which wanted a woman in space in the early
1960s. Tereshkova was launched into space on 16 June 1993 from Tyaturum aboard Vostok 6, guided by an automatic control
system. After just under 3 days in space, and 48 Earth orbits, Vostok 6
re-entered the atmosphere and Tereshkova successfully parachuted to Earth after
ejecting at 20,000 feet. She later received the Order of Lenin and Hero of the
Soviet Union awards.
15 May 1963, US astronaut Gordon Cooper, launched in an Atlas
rocket, made 22 orbits of the Earth.
5 February 1963, Maarten Schmidt identified red shifts in
quasars.
29 September 1962, Canada launched its first satellite, the Alouette.
22 July 1962, The Mariner
1 spacecraft flew erratically several minutes after launch and had to be
destroyed after less than five minutes, at a cost of $4,000,000 for the
satellite and $8,000,000 for the rocket. The $12 million dollar loss was later
traced to the omission of an overbar in the handwritten text from which the
computer programming for the rocket guidance system was drawn.
14 June 1962, The European Space Research Organisation was
formed in Paris.
26 April 1962, Britain�s first satellite, Ariel, was launched from Cape Canaveral.
20 February 1962. Astronaut John
Glenn made three orbits of the Earth in his spacecraft Mercury VI,
the first American in orbit. Bad weather on 26 January 1962 at Cape Canaveral
had delayed his launch.
1961, The first quasars were discovered.
1961, Frank Drake devised an equation
to estimate the number of detectable extra-terrestrial civilisations in the
Milky Way galaxy.
26 October 1961, First test flight of Saturn launch vehicle.
23 September 1961, Willie McCool, astronaut, was born.
25 May 1961, US President Kennedy announced the Apollo
space programme. Tests began on the Saturn-1
rocket system.
5 May 1961. The Americans put Alan Shephard into space for 15 minutes,
reaching an altitude of 116 miles before splashing down 303 miles from the
launch site. He was the second man and the first American to reach space.
However the Russian
space flight on 12 April 1961 had lasted 108 minutes and circled the Earth.
12 April 1961. Yuri Gagarin (1934-68) made the first orbit of
the Earth, at an altitude of 300km, in his spaceship Vostok 1. He took off from Tyuratom in Kazakhstan, made a single
Earth-orbit, and landed near Engels in the Saratov region.
22 August 1960. Two dogs
returned to Earth in a Soviet space craft. The Russian dogs, named Byelka
(Squirrel) and Strelka (Arrow) returned on board Sputnik V, along with 40 mice, two rats, and some plants, as they
prepared for a human launch. President John F Kennedy angrily asked US
scientists why the first pair of space dogs were called Strelka and Byelka and
not Rover and Fido.
25 June 1960, Walter Baade,
German-US astronomer, died in Gottingen, Germany.
15 May 1960, Sputnik IV
was launched.
13 April 1960, The USA launched Transit 1b, a weather satellite.
14 March 1960, Jodrell Bank radio telescope set a record for the
furthest communication with a man made object. Radio communications were
established with the US satellite Pioneer
5, over 407,000 miles away.
28 March 1959, Two monkeys returned alive to earth after being
sent into space by the USA.
17 February 1959, The Earth satellite Vanguard 2 was launched by the USA, to take photos of the Earth.
12 January 1959, A US$ 400 million contract for the Mercury
US space programme was awarded to the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation of St
Louis.
27 August 1958, Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev, Russian
cosmonaut, was born.
29 July 1958. NASA,
the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, was founded.
15 May 1958, The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 3 into Earth
orbit.
21 March 1958. London
Planetarium opened in Marylebone Street, the first planetarium in Britain.
17 March 1958, The US launched the Vanguard I satellite, the first with solar batteries.
31 January 1958, The US
Army at Cape Canaveral launched America�s first Earth satellite, Explorer I.
This led to the accidental discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts around
the Earth, when the satellite�s radiation meters suddenly showed zero readings.
US astronomer James Van Allen realised that the meters had been overloaded and
broken down.
4 January 1958, Sputnik 1 disintegrated after completing
1,367 orbits of the Earth. It had travelled some 43 million miles in 92 days.
24 April 1957. The BBC broadcast Patrick Moore�s �The Sky at Night� for the first time.
30 March 1957, Yelena Kondakova, Russian astronaut, was born.
8 February 1957, Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe, German physicist
who first used a Geiger counter to detect cosmic rays, died in Heidelberg, West
Germany.
12 January 1957, President Eisenhower urged the USSR to agree to a ban
on warfare in space.
10 September 1956, Robert Julius Trumpler, Swiss-US astronomer,
died in Oakland, California.
18 April 1955. Albert Einstein,
born 14 March 1879, died in
Princeton, New Jersey, of a stroke. He was born to a middle class German
family of Jewish ancestry. Einstein graduated in 1900 from the Federal
institute of technology in Zurich; he worked hard in the laboratory but skipped
lectures. He completed his general theory of relativity in 1915 and received
the Nobel Prize in 1922. He became an American citizen in 1940 after having
signed a famous letter to President F D Roosevelt warning that Germany
might try and build an atomic bomb.
30 November 1954, Mrs Hewlett Hodges, of Sylacauga, Alabama, USA, became the only person to have been struck
be a meteorite. The 4kg rock crashed through the roof of her house, bounced
off a radio, and hit her hip, causing a massive bruise but no other injuries.
7 December 1952, Forest Ray Moulton, US astronomer, died in
Wilmette, Illinois.
2 April 1952, Bernard Ferdinand Lyot, French astronomer,
died on a train near Cairo, Egypt.
Start of
radio astronomy, 1932-57
11 October 1957.
The radio telescope at Jodrell Bank,
Cheshire, planned by Sir
Bernard Lovell, went into operation.
1951, US astronomers Harold Ewen
and Edward
Purcell measured, from Harvard University, the 1.42 GHz radio waves from the Milky Way, the
signature of clouds of neutral hydrogen gas, which is what collapses to form
new stars.
1937, The US astronomer Grote Reber
built the first radio telescope.
1932, The US engineer Karl Jansky
(1905-50) became the first person to detect
radio waves from space. He discovered these waves accidentally because they
caused static whilst he was researching long-distance radio communications for
the Bell Telephone Company. However there was little interest in radio
astronomy until after World War Two.
1950, Atmospheric pollution
forced the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, to move to Herstmonceaux, Sussex.
30 September 1950, The first International Astronautical
Congress was held, with more than a thousand scientists, mostly from Europe,
assembling in Paris.
26 January 1949, The first test photograph was made at Mount
Palomar observatory.
25 June 1948, Jim Cohen, radio astronomer, was born (died 1
November 2006)
3 June 1948, The large telescope on Mount Palomar, California,
with its 5 metre aperture lens, came into service.
17 September 1946, Sir James Hopwood Jeans, English astronomer,
died in Dorking, Surrey.
1945, Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope, Cheshire,
was founded by Sir
Bernard Lovell.
Development of rockets and space travel, 1903 � 1957 (first animal sent
into space)
3 November 1957.
The Soviets
sent a dog into Earth-orbit. The dog, called Laika (meaning �barker�)
was a Siberian husky rounded up as a stray. She probably died of overheating
after measuring systems on board the Sputnik 2 failed, after a few hours in
orbit 2,000 miles above Earth. The space capsule continued to orbit Earth until
April 1958 when after 2,570 orbits it crashed to Earth, burning up in the
atmosphere. Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space, in April 1961 aboard Vostok 1. The Soviets sent 13 more dogs
into space, 8 of which survived.
4 October 1957. The first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik I, by the USSR was launched from Tyuratam, 170 miles east of
the Aral Sea. It weighed 80 kg.
21 August 1957, 1st Soviet rocket launch
at Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
2 January 1956, The British
Astronomer-Royal said the idea of space travel was �bilge�.
26 August 1952, The Soviet Union announced
the first successful intercontinental ballistic missile test.
17 June 1952, Jack Parsons, rocket fuel
pioneer, died.
10 May 1946, In rocket tests at White Sands, New Mexico,
a huge 14 ton rocket derived from German V-2 designs reached an altitude of 75
miles.
27 March 1945. The last German V-2 rocket fell on
Britain, at Orpington. (see 8 September 1944).� The Allies then overran the last V-2
launching site. In all, 1,050 rockets fell on England, each carrying a ton of
explosive with a range of 200 miles.� The
V-2s were designed by Werner von Braun, who surrendered to the
Americans in 1945.� Von Braun was given US
citizenship and helped design the rockets for the US space programme, including
the Saturn rockets and the Apollo missions.
8 September 1944, The first V-2 fell in on Chiswick in the London
area, killing three people. By the end of the war, 1,100 V-2s fell in
England an a further 1,675 on the continent, mainly on Antwerp.� V-2 stood for Vergeltungswaffe, or �reprisal
weapon�. The V-2 rocket weighed 12
tons and travelled at 3,600 mph, faster than sound, so there was no warning of
its imminent arrival. It had a range of 200 miles and carried a one ton bomb.
The Germans fired them from launchers in The Netherlands, but the explosions in
London were attributed, by the authorities, to gas explosions to mislead the
German intelligence. The earlier V-1 rocket was slower and had a shorter range;
V-1 strikes on London ceased as the Allies captured the launch sites in France.
13 June 1944. The first V-1 flying bomb,
or doodlebug, to hit Britain landed on a house in Southampton, killing three
people.� Within 24 hours, others hit
London.�
30 March 1926, American physicist Robert
Hutchings Goddard successfully tested the world�s first
liquid-propellant rocket. It reached a height of 56 metres and attained a speed
of 97 kilometres per hour.
16 March 1926, US physicist Robert Goddard
launched the first liquid fuel rocket, in Massachusetts. It rose to 12.5
metres.
2 October 1914, Jack Parsons, US rocket
engineer, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet
in California, was born in Los Angeles (died 1952 in an explosion)
23 March 1912, Wernher von Braun, German rocket
scientist, was born in Wirsitz.
1903, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
(1857-1935) published a paper on rocket space travel using liquid propellants.
On 1 May 1933 Tsioilkovsky
predicted that many Soviet citizens would live to see space flight.
23 June 1942, Lord Martin Rees of Ludlow, astronomer, was
born.
8 January 1942, Stephen Hawking, astrophysicist, was born.
25 May 1939, Sir Frank Dyson, British astronomer and
director of Greenwich Observatory, died.
6 March 1937, Valentino Tereshkova, Russian astronaut and first woman in
space in 1963, was born.
9 November 1934, Carl Sagan, US astronomer, was born in New
York.
9 March 1934. Yuri Gagarin,
first man in space, was born near Smolensk, son of a collective farmer.
1933, Frank Zwicky and Walter Baade
first theorised that supernovae might produce neutron stars
14 November 1933, Fred Haise, US astronaut, was born in Biloxi,
Mississippi.
13 March 1933, Robert Thorburn Ayton Innes, Scottish astronomer,
died in Surbiton, England.
30 August 1931, John Swigert, US astronaut, was born in
Denver, Colorado.
17 September 1930, Thomas Stafford, US astronaut, was born in
Weatherford, Oklahoma.
3 June 1930, Pete Conrad, astronaut, was born.
Distant galaxies
discovered; Big Bang Theory
1929, US astronomer Edwin Hubble
found that the further a galaxy was away from Earth, the more its light was
red-shifted. This red-shift had first been observed in 1912 by another US
astronomer, Vesto
Slipher. Hubble worked out that this effect was caused
by the galaxies receding from us as the Universe expands. See 1842.
1927, The Big Bang Theory was
first proposed.
30 December 1924, US astronomer Edwin Hubble
proved that there are galaxies beyond our Milky Way. He theorised that the red
shift in the light from these distant galaxies was due to the expansion of the
Universe.
10 October 1929, Irvin Shapiro was born in New York City, USA.
In 1971 he researched quasars.
23 July 1928, Vera C Rubin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In 1973, with W
Kent, she established that the Milky Way has a proper motion of
around 500 km / second relative to distant galaxies.
25 March 1928, James Lovell, American astronaut, was born in Cleveland,
Ohio.
23 February 1928, Vasili Lazaref,
cosmonaut, was born.
25 June 1927, Professor Sir Arnold Wolfendale,
astronomer, was born.
3 April 1926, Virgil Grissom, third man in space, was born.
18 November 1923, Alan Shepard, the first US astronaut in space, was born in East Derry, New
Hampshire.
21 October 1923, The world�s first planetarium opened, in Munich.
4 March 1923, The astronomer and broadcaster Patrick Moore was born in Pinner.
10 December 1921, Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize for
Physics, for his work on Relativity.
18 July 1921, John Glenn, US astronaut and first man to orbit the
Earth, was born in Cambridge, Ohio.
13 December 1920, Francis G. Pease's interferometer at Mount
Wilson Observatory was the first to measure the diameter of a star other than
the Sun, Betelgeuse.
12 December 1920, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, US astronomer, died in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
22 May 1920, Thomas Gold, astronomer, was born in Vienna.
30 March 1919, Scientists used a solar eclipse to confirm Einstein�s
Theory of Relativity. British astronomer Arthur Edington verified Einstein�s Theory of
Relativity by observing stars whose position was close to the Sun, during a
solar eclipse in the South Pacific, and confirming that their apparent position
had shifted due to the Sun�s gravity as the Theory predicted.
27/9.1918, Martin Ryle, English radio astronomer, was born
(died 1984).
1918, Harrow Shapley discovered the
size of the Milky Way galaxy.
24 June 1915, Professor Fred Hoyle, British astronomer and
science fiction writer, was born.
31 August 1913, The astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell, pioneer in
the field of radio astronomy was born in Gloucestershire.�
7 December 1912, Sir George Howard Darwin, English astronomer,
was born in Cambridge.
20 August 1912, US physicist Edward Mills Purcell was born in
Taylorville, Illinois. In 1951 he was among the first to observe the 21 cm line
caused by hydrogen atoms in space.
9 July 1911, John Archibald Wheeler was born in Jacksonville,
Florida. He coined the term Black Hole to describe an object so massive not
even light can escape.
19 October 1910, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Indian astronomer,
was born in Lahore. In 1931 he predicted that white dwarf stars can only exist
if their mass is below 1.4x the Sun, now known as the Chandrasekhar�s Limit.
2 October 1910, The asteroid Interamnia, seventh largest in
the Solar System (300 km in diameter) was discovered by Italian astronomer Vincenzo Cerulli from an
observatory in Teramo.
11 July 1909, Simon
Newcomb, US astronomer, died (born 12 March 1835).
23 December 1907, Pierre Janssen, French astronomer, died (born
22 February 1824).
20 January 1907, Agnes Clerke, English astronomer, died (born
10 February 1842).
3 January 1906, William Wilson Morgan was born in Bethesda,
Tennessee, USA. He first demonstrated
that the Milky Way galaxy has a spiral structure, like M31.
22 October 1905, Karl Jansky was born in Norman, Oklahoma. In
1931 his experiments with an improvised radio aerial led to the birth of radio astronomy. Some radio emissions
were found to be coming from the Milky Way.
12 August 1900, James Edward Keeler, US astronomer, died in
San Francisco, California.
28 April 1900, Jan Oort, astronomer, was born.
14 February 1898, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky was born in Varna,
Bulgaria.
12 August 1897, Otto Struve, Russian-American astronomer, was
born in Kharkov, Russia. He discovered thin clouds of dust and gas between
stars, suggesting a mechanism for planet formation.
9 May 1897, Edward James Stone, British astronomer, died
(born 28 February 1831 in London)
20 October 1896, Francois Felix Tisserand, French astronomer,
died (born in Cotes d�Or 13 January 1845)
25 June 1894, Hermann Julius Oberth, designer of the V2
flying rocket bombs that plagued London at the end of World War Two, was born
this day.
28 May 1893, Charles Pritchard, British astronomer, died
(born 29 February 108 in Alberbury, Shropshire).
25 June 1892, Amedee Mouchez, French astronomer, died (born
24 August 1821).
2 January 1892, Sir George Airy, Astronomer-Royal who
modernised the Greenwich Observatory, died at Alnwick, Northumberland.
1890, EC Pickering at Harvard
University began to devise a classification
system for stars, based on their colour and luminosity, starting with A for
the white ones and working through B, C, etc. for the yellow., orange, red
ones. He needed extra categories, leading to a jumbled system still used today,
of WOBAFGKMRNS. One mnemonic for this is Wow O Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me Right Now
Sweetie. Today we have subcategories such as A1 to A9.
1890, The Russian Astronomical Society was founded.
20 November 1889, Edwin Hiubble, astronomer, was born,
28 June 1889, Maria Mitchell, US astronomer, died (born 1
August 1818)
28 February 1882, John Thomas Romney Robinson, Irish astronomer,
died (born in Dublin 23 April 1792)
19 April 1889, Warren de la Rue, British astronomer, died in London.
12 September 1888, 23 March 1837, Thursday (-39,492) Richard
Anthony Proctor, British astronomer, died in New York (born 23 March 1837 in
Chelsea)
31 December 1887, The Lick 91 centimetre refracting telescope
was installed on Mount Hamilton, near San Francisco, USA. This was the world�s
first mountaintop telescope.
2 November 1885, Harlow Shapley, astronomer, was born.
8/1885, The first supernova
outside the Milky Way galaxy was seen, in the Andromeda �nebula� (now known to
be another galaxy). At its peak it was estimated to have been 15 million times
as bright as the Sun.
17 October 1883, The Ben Nevis observatory was opened.
6 August 1879, Johann von Lamont, German astronomer, died
(born 13 December 1805).
14 March 1879. Albert Einstein,
physicist and mathematician, was born in Ulm, Bavaria, to Jewish parents.
23 September 1877, Urbain Leverrier, French astronomer, died in Paris.
26 June 1877, Giovanni Santini, Italian astronomer, died
(born in Arezzo 30 January 1787)
11 April 1875, Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, German astronomer,
died in Dessau (born 25 October 1789 in Dessau)
17 February 1875, Friedrich Argelander, German astronomer, died
17 February 1875 in Bonn (born 22 March 1799 in Memel).
28 March 1874, Peter Hansen, Danish astronomer, died (born 8
December 1795).
20 September 1873, Battista Donati, Italian astronomer, died
(born 16 December 1826).
11 May 1871, Sir John Frederick Herschel, English
astronomer, died at Collingwood, Hawkhurst, Kent.
26 February 1868, Angelo Secchi, Italian astronomer, died in
Rome (born 29 June 1818 in Reggio, Lombardy)
8 January 1868, Sir Frank Dyson, British astronomer, was born in
Measham, then in Derbyshire.
31 October 1867, William Parsons Rosse, Irish telescope
constructor, died in Monkstown (born 17 June 1800 in York)
26 August 1865, Johann Encke, German astronomer, died (born 23
September 1791).
31 December 1864, Robert Aitken, US astronomer (died 29 October 1951)
was born.
23 November 1864, Friedrich Struve, German astronomer, died in
St Petersburg (born 15 April 1793 in Altona)
11 December 1863, Astronomer Annie Jump Cannon was born in
Dover, Delaware, USA.
Her work formed the basis if the Henry Draper catalogue of 225,300 stars.
21 June 1863, Maximilian Wolf, German astronomer, was born
in Heidelberg.
10 April 1863, Giovanni Battista Amici, Italian astronomer,
died in Florence (born 25 March 1786 in Modena).
21 December 1862, Carl Rumker, German astronomer, died in Lisbon
(born 28 May 1788 in Mecklenburg)
30 October 1862, Ormsby Mitchel, US astronomer, died.
31 January 1862, US astronomer Alva Graham Clark discovered the
white dwarf star Sirius B.
10 November 1861, Robert Innes was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.
In 1915 he discovered a faint companion to the double star Alpha Centauri. This
faint star is, apart from the Sun, the nearest star to earth, so it is called
Proxima Centauri.
27 January 1860, Sir Thomas Brisbane, Scottish astronomer, died
(born 23 July 1773).
2 June 1858, G B Donati, Italian astronomer, discovered the comet
now named after him.
17 September 1857, Russian physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was born
in Izhevsk. In 1895 he proposed the use of liquid-fuelled rockets to propel
vehicles into space.
13 March 1855, Percival Lowell, US astronomer, was born in
Boston, Massachusetts.
30 January 1853, Sears Cook Walker, US astronomer, died near
Cincinatti (born 28 March 1805 in Massachusetts)
1850, French astronomer Edouard Roche
proved that if a satellite approached within a little over twice the diameter
of the planet it was orbiting, tidal
forces would break it apart and it would form a ring, like Saturn�s..
28 December 1850, Heinrich Christian Schumacher,, German
astronomer, died in Altona (born 3 September 1780 in Holstein)
9 January 1848, Caroline Herschel, English astronomer, died
(born 16 March 1750).
19 July 1846, Charles Edward Pickering, US astronomer, was
born in Boston.
17 March 1846, Friedrich Bessel, German astronomer, died in
Konigsberg (born in Minden 22 July 1784)
13 January 1845, Francois Felix Tisserand, French astronomer,
was born in Cotes d�Or (died 20 October 1896)
30 August 1844, Edward Baily, British astronomer, died in
London on 30 August 1844. He was born in Newbury, Berkshire, 10 March 1788.
1842, Christian Doppler amounted, in
Prague, the Doppler Effect; that
motion changed the wavelength of light. This principle is used to determine the
velocity of stars relative to Earth. The hypothesis was tested for sound waves by Buys Ballot
in 1845. See 1929.
10 February 1842, Agnes Clerke, English astronomer, was born
(died 20 January 1907).
2 March 1840, Heinrich Olbers, German astronomer, died (born
11 October 1758 near Bremen)
9 September 1839, Astronomer John Herschel took the first
astronomical plate glass photograph. He pioneered the development of this
method of astronomy.
1838, German astronomer Friedrich
Bessel announced the first calculation of a distance from Earth to another star. He used triangulation from two
different points in the Earth�s orbit to measure the apparent change in
position of the star, 61 Cygni, and came up with 10.3 light years (modern
figure 11.08 L Y). Another astronomer, the Englishman Thomas Henderson, had also made
calculations of the distance to Alpha Centauri, and announced these the
following year.
23 March 1837, Richard Anthony Proctor, British astronomer,
was born in Chelsea (died 12 September 1888 in New York)
12 March 1835, Simon Newcomb, US astronomer, was born (died
11 July 1909)
31 December 1832, George Rumker, astronomer, was born in Hamburg
(died 3 March 1900)
10 July 1832, Alvan Clark, astronomer, was born in Fall
River, Massachusetts, USA. In 1862 he observed for the first time the star
Sirius B, now known to be a white dwarf.
14 October 1831, Jean Louis Pons, French astronomer, died in
Florence (born 24 December 1761)
28 February 1831, Edward James Stone, British astronomer, was born (died 9
May 1897)
22 December 1828, Eduard Schonfeld, German astronomer, was born
in Hildburghausen (died 1 May 1891)
1826, Heinrich Olbers formulated Olber�s Paradox;
if stars are evenly distributed through infinite space, why is the sky dark?
Modern theories of an expanding universe have solved this paradox.
16 December 1826, Battista Donati, Italian astronomer, was born
(died 20 September 1873).
23 November 1826, Johann Bode, German astronomer, died in Berlin
(born in Hamburg 19 January 1747).
22 July 1826, Guiseppe Piazzi, Italian astronomer, died in
Naples (born 16 July 1746)
21 May 1826, Georg von Reichenbach, German astronomical
instrument maker, died in Munich (born 14 August 1772 in Durlach, Baden
16 May 1826, Richard Carrington, astronomer, was born (died
27 November 1875).
27 September 1824, Benjamin Gould, astronomer, was born (died 26
November 1896).
22 February 1824, Pierre Janssen, French astronomer, was born
(died 23 December 1907).
7 February 1824, Sir William Huggins, English astronomer, was
born (died 12 May 1910).
1823, An observatory was built
on Ben Nevis, Scotland, to study sun-spots.
18 November 1821, Franz Brunnow, German astronomer, was born
(died 20 August 1891).
24 August 1821, Amedee Mouchez, French astronomer, was born
(died 25 June 1892)
3 January 1819, Charles Piazzi Smyth, British astronomer, was
born in Naples (died 21 February 1900 in Ripon, Yorkshire)
1 August 1818, Maria Mitchell, US astronomer, was born (died
28 June 1889)
29 June 1818, Angelo Secchi, Italian astronomer, was born in
Reggio, Lombardy (died 26 February 1878 in Rome)
12 April 1817, Charles Messier, French astronomer who made a list
of nebulae known as the Messier catalogue, died.
29 August 1816, Johann Hieronymous Schroter, German
astronomer, died (born in Erfurt 10 August 1745)
17 June 1814, Robert Grant, British astronomer, was born
(died 24 October 1892).
9 February 1811, Nevil Maskelyne, English astronomer, died
(born 6 October 1732).
4 April 1807, Joseph Lalande, French astronomer, died (born
11 July 1732).
13 December 1805, Johann von Lamont, German astronomer, was born
(died 6 August 1879)
28 March 1805, Sears Cook Walker, US astronomer, was born in
Massachusetts (died 30 January 1853 near Cincinatti)
5 April 1804, The High Possil meteorite strike, near Glasgow,
Scotland. This was the first meteorite strike to be both witnessed and
scientifically investigated.
1801, French astronomer Joseph Lalande
published a catalogue of the 47,390 known stars.
27 July 1801, Sir George Airy, British astronomer, was born
in Alnwick (died 2 January 1892 in Greenwich, London).
5 November 1800, Jesse Ramsden, British astronomical
instrument maker, died in Brighton (born 6 October 1735 near Halifax, Yorkshire)
17 June 1800, William Parsons Rosse, Irish telescope
constructor, was born in York (died 31 October 1867 in Monkstown).
31 May 1799, Pierre Lemonnier, French
astronomer, died (born 23 November 1715).
22 March 1799, Friedrich Argelander, German astronomer, was
born in Memel (died 17 February 1875 in Bonn).
28 December 1798, Thomas Henderson was born in Dundee, Scotland.
In 1839 he measured the parallax of Alpha-Centauri, making it the second star
after the Sun whose distance is known.
16 December 1796, Johann Titius, astronomer, died in Wittemberg.
26 June 1796, David Rittenhouse, US
astronomer, died in Philadelphia (born 8 April 1732 in Germanstown, Pennsylvania)
8 December 1795, Peter Hansen, Danish astronomer, was born
(died 28 March 1874).
15 June 1795, Richard Morrison, English
astronomer, was born (died 5 April 1874).
12 November 1792, Jean Bailly,�
astronomer, was guillotined 12 November 1793 (born 15 September 1736).
23 April 1792, John Thomas Romney Robinson,
Irish astronomer, was born in Dublin (died 28 February 1882)
14 April 1792, Maximlian Hell, astronomer,
died.
7 March 1792. Sir John Herschel, the astronomer who mapped
the stars of the southern hemisphere, was born in Slough.
23 September 1791, Johann Encke, German astronomer, was born
(died 26 August 1865)
25 October 1789, Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, German astronomer,
was born in Dessau (died 11 April 1875 in Dessau)
14 October 1788, Sir Edward Sabine, English astronomer, was
born in Dublin (died 26 May 1883 in East Sheen, London)
28 May 1788, Carl Rumker, German astronomer, was born in
Mecklenburg (died 21 December 1862 in Lisbon)
13 December 1787, Mathematician, physicist and astronomer Ruggiero
Guiseppe Boscovich died in Milan.
30 January 1787, Giovanni Santini, Italian astronomer, was born
in Arezzo (died 26 June 1877)
25 March 1786, Giovanni Battista Amici, Italian astronomer,
was born in Modena (died 10 April 1863 in Florence).
25 February 1786, Thomas Wright, astronomer, died at Byers
Green, England.
1784, English geologist John Michell
(1724-93) first proposed that stars could exist that were so massive not even
light could escape from them. He called these �dark stars�. See 1968.
22 July 1784, Friedrich Bessel, German astronomer, was born
in Minden (died in Konigsberg 17 March 1846).
16 April 1783, Christian Mayer, astronomer, died.
3 September 1780, Heinrich Christian Schumacher,, German
astronomer, was born in Holstein (died 28 December 1850 in Altona)
28 April 1774, Edward Baily, British astronomer, was born in
Newbury, Berkshire. He died in London on 30 August 1844.
4 March 1774, William Herschel first sighted the Orion
nebula.
23 July 1773, Sir Thomas Brisbane, Scottish astronomer, was
born (died 27 January 1860).
1772, Johann Daniel Titus first
formulated what is now known as Bode�s Law; that the ratio of the distance of the
inner planets form the Sun is given by the series 0, 3, 6, 12, 24�with 4 added
to each term.
24 August 1772, Georg von Reichenbach, German astronomical
instrument maker, was born in Durlach, Baden (died 21 May 1826 in Munich)
12 September 1768, Joseph Delisle, French astronomer, died (born
4 April 1688).
13 July 1762, James Bradley, English astronomer, died (born
in Gloucestershire 15 March 1711).
21 March 1762, Nicolas Lacaille, French astronomer, died
(born 15 March 1713).
20 February 1762, Johann Mayer, German astronomer, died.
24 December 1761, Jean Louis Pons, French astronomer, was born
(died 14 October 1831 in Florence)
23 September 1761, German astronomer Jean Louis Pons was born in
Hamburg.
1760, German physicist Johann Lambert
(born in Mulhause, 26 August 1728) first used the term albedo (whiteness) for the
differing reflectivity of planetary bodies.
11 October 1758, Heinrich Olbers, German astronomer, was born
near Bremen (died 2 March 1840)
18 April 1756, Jacques Cassini, astronomer, died (born 8
February 1677).
1750, English astronomer Thomas
Wright (1711-86) first proposed that the Milky Way was a collection of stars
like the Sun.
16 March 1750, Caroline Herschel, English astronomer, was
born (died 9 January 1848).
19 September 1749, Jean Delambre, French astronomer, was born (died
19 August 1822).
28 March 1749, Pierre Laplace, French astronomer, was born
(died 5 March 1827)
19 January 1747, Johann Bode, German astronomer, was born in
Hamburg (died in Berlin 23 November 1826).
16 July 1746, Guiseppe Piazzi, Italian astronomer, was born
(died 22 July 1826 in Naples)
30 August 1745, Johann Hieronymous Schroter, German
astronomer, was born in Erfurt (died 29 August 1816)
14 January 1742, Astronomer-Royal Edmond Halley died at Greenwich aged 85.
15 September 1736, Jean Bailly,�
astronomer, was born in Paris (guillotined 12 November 1793).
6 October 1735, Jesse Ramsden, British
astronomical instrument maker, was born near Halifax, Yorkshire (died 5
November 1800 in Brighton)
6 October 1732, Nevil Maskelyne, English
astronomer, was born (died 9 February 1811).
11 July 1732, Joseph Lalande, French
astronomer, was born (died 4 April 1807)
8 April 1732, David Rittenhouse, US
astronomer, was born in Germanstown, Pennsylvania (died 26 June 1796 in
Philadelphia)
2 March 1729, Francesco Bianchini, Italian astronomer, died in Rome (born
in Verona 13 December 1662).
1728, Aberration of starlight, the apparent
displacement of stars and their change of colour, as the Earth orbits the Sun,
was discovered by James Bradley.
12 September 1725, Guillaume le
Gentil, astronomer, was born.
31 December 1719, John Flamsteed, first Astronomer-Royal, ,
died. His catalogue of stars for ship�s navigators was still incomplete after
40 years of work.
23 November 1715, Pierre Lemonnier, French astronomer, was born
(died 31 May 1799).
15 March 1713, Nicolas Lacaille, French astronomer, was born
(died 21 March 1762).
11 September 1712, Giovanni Cassini astronomer, died (born 8 June
1625).
15 March 1711, James Bradley, English astronomer, was born in
Gloucestershire (died13 July 1762).
19 September 1710, Ole Romer, astronomer, died.
10 October 1708, Scottish astronomer and mathematician David Gregory
died in Maidenhead, Berkshire.
1705, Edmund Halley, English
astronomer (1656-1742), calculated the orbital period of the comet named after
him. He correctly predicted its return in 1758.
Isaac
Newton
5 July 1687, Isaac Newton published his great work Principia, 3 volumes, describing gravitation,
the size of bodies in the Solar System and their orbits., and the shape of the
Earth.
10 December 1684, Isaac Newton�s derivation of Kepler�s
Laws of Gravity was read in a paper to The Royal Society by Edmund Halley.
February
1669, Isaac Newton
first described his reflecting telescope in a letter to Henry Oldenburg (1619-77), first
Secretary of the Royal Society.
1668, Isaac Newton built the first
reflecting telescope.
25 December 1642, Isaac Newton was born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham, the
son of a farmer.
4 April 1688, Joseph Delisle, French astronomer, was born
(died 12 September 1768).
12 July 1682, Death of Jean Picard,
astronomer who first calculated the circumference of the Earth.
8 February 1677, Jacques Cassini,
astronomer, was born (died 18 April 1756).
10 August 1675, Charles II established Greenwich
Observatory, at Flamsteed House, Greenwich.� Its foundation stone was laid this day.
4 March 1675, Charles II appointed John Flamsteed as the first
Astronomer-Royal.
25 September 1644, Ole Roemer, Danish astronomer, was born in
Aarhus (died 23 September 1710 in Copenhagen)
24 August 1664, Maria Cunitz, Silesian astronomer, died.
13 December 1662, Francesco Bianchini, Italian astronomer, was
born in Verona (died in Rome 2 March 1729).
19 August 1646, John Flamsteed, first Astronomer Royal,
was born in Denby, near Derby.
8 January 1642, Galileo,
Italian
mathematician physicist and astronomer, professor at the University of Padua,
died.�
3 January 1641, Jeremiah Horrocks, English astronomer, died
(born 1619).
24 November 1639, A transit of Venus across the Sun was first
observed by Jeremiah Horrocks.
1638, The first variable star was identified as such by Dutch
astronomer Phocyclides.
The star, Mir Ceta, had earlier been observed fading from view by David Fabricius
in 1596.
6 November 1638, James Gregory, Scottish mathematician who gave
a demonstration of the first practical reflecting telescope, was born.
6 September 1635, Metius, astronomer and mathematician, died.
12 April 1633, The trial of Galileo Galilei
before the Inquisition
began. At the end of which he would be ordered to recant his belief that the
Sun not the Earth was the centre of the Universe, as heretical.
Johannes Kepler, 1571-1630
15 November 1630, Johannes Kepler, astronomer,
died in Regensburg, Germany.
1627, German astronomer, Kepler,
catalogued
the position of 1,005 stars.
30 October 1613, Astronomer Johannes Kepler
married his 2nd wife, Susanna Reuttinger.
17 October 1604, Johannes Kepler observed a
supernova.
24 October 1601, Johannes Kepler succeeded Tycho Brahe
as imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolph II.
4 February 1600, Astronomers Johannes Kepler
and Tycho
Brahe met for the first time, near Prague.
27 April 1597, Johannes Kepler, astronomer,
married widow Barbara Muller.
27 December 1571, Johannes Kepler, astronomer, was
born. He discovered that planets have elliptical orbits
Tycho Brahe,
1546-1601
24 October 1601, Tycho Brahe, Danish Royal Astronomer, died in Benatky, near
Prague, Czechoslovakia.
1577, Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe catalogued 777 stars. Tycho�s
comet first observed.
11 November 1572, Astronomer Tycho Brahe
saw a �new star�, a supernova, in the constellation of Cassiopeia. The fixed
stars were meant to be eternal, unchanging. Along with Copernicus� assertion
that the Sun, not the earth, is the centre of the Universe, this undermined
traditional church cosmology.
14 December 1546, Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer
and mathematician, was born in Knudstrup.
14 April 1629, Christiaan Huygens, Dutch astronomer, was born
(died 8 June 1695).
8 June 1625, Giovanni Cassini astronomer, was born (died 11
September 1712).
21 July 1620, Jean Picard, astronomer, was born
26 February 1616. The
Church ordered Galileo to abandon his theory that the Sun, not the Earth,
is the centre of the Universe.
28 January 1611, Johann Hevelius, German astronomer, was born
(died 28 January 1687)
1609, Galileo made several key observations and deductions with the newly-invented
�optical tube� or telescope. He observed the landscape of the Moon, and
noted how the dark portion was faintly lit, by light reflected from Earth. He
observed four smaller bodies near Jupiter, and noted how these orbited Jupiter,
proving the Earth-Moon system was not an anomaly. He saw the planets as discs,
but the stars remained pinpoints of light, suggesting they were much further away,
He observed the movement of sunspots across the Sun, proving that it too
rotated. Perhaps most significantly he saw how the planet Venus was much
smaller, further away, when its full disc was visible but larger when it became
a crescent, showing that it too orbited the Sun. It was this observation, that bodies orbited the Sun, not the Earth,
that the Church strongly objected to.
2 October 1608, Dutch lensmaker Jan Lippershey first
demonstrated the telescope. It was
initially known as a �Dutch Trunke�; the word �telescope� was not coined for
several more years.
1 September 1600, Tadeus Hajek, astronomer, died.
17 February 1600, Italian
astronomer Giordano
Bruno was burnt at the stake, for the heresy of suggesting that the
stars were distant suns, possibly with their own planets.
8 August 1576, The first purpose-built observatory was
constructed in Denmark.
20 January 1573, Simon Marius was born in Gunzenhausen,
Germany. He was the first astronomer to mention Andromeda.
15 February 1564, Galileo
Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy.
24 May 1543. The Polish astronomer, Nicolas Copernicus died of apoplexy.� Born on 19 February 1473, in Torun, Poland,
Copernicus is regarded as the founder of modern astronomy.� When his father died, Copernicus� uncle Lucas
Waczenrode became his guardian.� In 1491
Copernicus went to the University of Krakow to study Latin,
mathematics, astronomy, geography, and philosophy.� He returned home after 4 years without a
degree, and studied Canon Law at the University of Bologna so as to have a
church career. From a turret on the walls of Bologna Cathedral, Copernicus
studied the stars, and in 1530 produced a 400 page treatise, De Revolutionibus
Orbium Coelestium (On the revolutions of the celestial spheres). This put
forward the idea that the earth rotated on its own axis daily and annually
around the Sun. It was published in the year of his death, 1543, and greeted
with a hostile reception as it challenged the ancient teaching that the Earth
was the centre of the Universe.
1491, Copernicus studied at Cracow University.
6 July 1476, Regiomontanus (Johann Muller), German
astronomer, died in Rome (born 6 June 1436 in Konigsberg)
19 February 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus,
Polish astronomer,
was born in Torun, Poland.
6 June 1436, Regiomontanus (Johann Muller), German
astronomer, was born in Konigsberg (died 6 July 1476 in Rome)
1420, The Mongol ruler Ulugh Beg established a large
observatory at Samarkand, probably inspired by earlier Muslim observatories such as the one at
Maragha, Azerbaijan. The Samarkand observatory was much larger than its
predecessors. Ulugh Beg completed a large star catalogue in 1439. However this work
was destroyed by his son Adballatif after Ulugh Beg was murdered in 1449,
because Adballatif had been exiled on the advice of astrologers.
1259, Nasreddin (1201-74), ruler
of Iran, completed his observatory at Maragha. It had a staff of 15 and a library
of 400,000 books, and observational enabled Nasreddin to compile accurate
tables of planetary motion.
1232, First recorded use of rockets, by the Chinese military
against the Mongols.
1092, In China, Su Sung
built a �cosmic engine�; an apparatus showing the changing position of
celestial objects in the sky.
1080, Arzachel,
Arab astronomer, suggested that planetary orbits were elliptical.
4 July 1054, Chinese astronomers recorded a supernova so
bright it could be seen in daylight for 23 days and at night for almost 2 years. This now forms the
Crab Nebula.
964, Al-Sufi published an illustrated
text, the Book of Fixed Stars.
813, A school of astronomy opened in
Baghdad.
750, Chinese astronomers were travelling
as far south as Java to observe the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere.
517, Aryabhata
wrote a manual of astronomy.
Ca. 120 BCE, Hipparchus of Nicaea died (born
ca. 190 BCE). He calculated the distance from the Earth to the Moon, as 238,600
miles (384,000 km).
Ca. 230 BCE, Death of Aristarchus (born ca. 310 BCE).
He was one of the first to assert that neither the Earth nor the Sun were the
centre of the Universe � a principle rediscovered by Copernicus nearly 2,000
years later. Aristarchus observed the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a
lunar eclipse, and calculated that the Earth was 3x the diameter of the Moon.
240 BCE, The Greek astronomer Eratosthenes
(276 � 194 BCE) calculated the circumference of the Earth. He noticed that the
Sun cast no shadow in Aswan, Egypt, but in the same day of the year in
Alexandria, 800km further north, it was 7 degrees off vertical. From this
Eratosthenes calculated the Earth�s circumference as around 40,000 km. This is
very close to the true figure of 40,007 km, through the Poles. He also suggested that the Earth moved
around the Sun. However Claudius Ptolemy (87-150) believed the Earth to be at the centre of the Universe; it was this
Ptolemaic view that prevailed in Church thinking right down to the time of
Copernicus.
352 BCE, First recorded sighting of a
supernova, by the Chinese.
375 BCE, Democritus of Greece first
recognised that the Milky Way is composed of stars like the Sun.
385 BCE, The Greek astronomer, Heracleides,
became the first person to suggest that the planets Venus and Mercury orbited
the Sun.
435 BCE, The Metonic Cycle, about 19 years, was discovered by Metos of Athens.
It is a multiple of the lunar and solar calendars, can predict eclipses, and forms
the basis of the Greek and Jewish calendars.
472 BCE, Pythagoras was born. He provided
the first scientific proof that the Earth is round; the star Canopus could be
seen at Alexandria, Egypt, but not further north in Athens, Greece; also the
shadow of the Earth on the Moon in a lunar eclipse was curved, so the Earth
must also be curved.
6 April 648 BCE, First solar eclipse recorded by the ancient Greeks.
1400 BCE, Chinese astronomers began keeping
records of novae and supernovae.
1775 BCE, The Babylonians, under Hammurabi, compiled star charts and records of
planetary motions.
Asteroid and Meteor exploration
27 September 2022, NASA collided a
space probe with the asteroid Dimorphos, to see if an asteroid threatening to
hit Earth could be diverted this way.
19 October 2017, Rob Weryk of the University of Hawaii first
spotted an asteroid-like object that, from its speed and trajectory, appeared
to have originated from outside the Solar System.
6 September 2014, A small
meteorite landed in woods near Managua, Nicaragua, leaving a crater 5 metres
deep and 24 metres across.
15 February 2013, A large meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia; 1,491 were injured and over 4,000
buildings damaged.
28 October 1991, The American Galileo spacecraft made a
close approach to 951 Gaspra, becoming the first space probe to visit an asteroid.
27 October 1973, The Canon City meteorite, a 1.4kg
chondrite, fell in Fremont County, Colorado, USA.,
8 February 1969, A large meteorite scattered several tons of
material over a large area of Chihuahua Province, Mexico. It was named the
Allende meteorite, after the nearest village to the impact point.
24 December 1965, A cluster of meteorites fell in the
Barwell, Leicestershire, UK area after a brilliant fireball. The original
meteorite is estimated to have weighed around 200 lbs.
30 October 1937. The 500,000 ton asteroid Hermes missed the
earth by 485,000 miles.
13 July 1908, An explosion 1,000 x greater than Hiroshima
flattened 80 million trees over 800 square miles near the River Tungaska, Siberia.� It is thought to have been a meteor or comet.
1898, The asteroid Eros, was
discovered. It is of irregular shape, 4 miles wide but 1`5 miles long.
1859, Asteroid Metis was first
observed.
1847, Asteroids Iris and Flora
were discovered by John Russell Hind.
1845, Asteroid Astraea was first
observed by Karl
Hencke. Within 2 years he had also discovered asteroid Hebe.
1807, Asteroid Vesta was first
observed by Heinrich
Olbers.
1 September 1804, The asteroid Juno was discovered by Professor
Harding, an assistant of Heinrich Olbers.
19 April 1803, Near the village of L�agle, France, a ball of fire
in the sky caused a noise like thunder, and then stones fell from the sky, fast
enough to bury themselves in the ground. The largest stone weighed 17.5
lbs.� Jean Baptiste Piot, born Paris
21 April 1774, studied these meteorites and concluded they were
extra-terrestrial in origin.
28 March 1802, Asteroid Pallas was first observed by Heinrich Olbers.
1 January 1801, Guiseppe Piazzi at Palermo, Italy
discovered Ceres, diameter 427 miles, the
largest of the minor planets. He named it
after the patron saint of Sicily.
Comet exploration
12 November 2014,� The Philae
Lander touched down onto a comet, 320
million miles from Earth; the first such landing accomplished. Although the
craft bounced and ended up partially shaded from the Sun, useful data was
returned until the probe finally �died� on 9 July 2015.
23 March 1997, Comet Hale-Bopp made its closest approach to Earth, 196 million km
away.
15 August 1977, Radio astronomers at Ohio State University
picked up a powerful radio burst at 1420 Megahertz. This was thought to be a
frequency at which intelligent aliens might broadcast as it is a significant radio
absorption and emission frequency of hydrogen atoms. It was dubbed the �Wow�
signal after the comment scribbled on the radio transcript document by Jerry Ehman.
In 2016 astronomers decided it might have been from passing comets.
18 May 1910. The Earth passed through the tail of Halley�s
Comet; some people feared disaster.
21 October 1909, Halley�s
Comet was sighted from Cambridge Observatory, UK.
11 September 1909, Halley�s
Comet was first observed, at Heidelberg.
5 November 1906, Fred Lawrence Whipple was born in Red Oak,
Indiana. In 1949 he suggested that comets are �dirty snowballs� consisting of
water ice and ammonia ice with rock dust.
8 November 1656. Edmond Halley, who discovered Halley�s comet, was born in London. He
was the first to realise that comets do not appear at random, but have
predictable orbits.
635, The
Chinese observed that the tail of a comet always points away from the Sun.
467 BCE, Halley�s comet was first observed
by the Chinese (periodicity 76.1 years)
Jupiter exploration
13 April 2023, The Jupiter Icy Moons
Explorer (JUICE) space probe blasted off from French Guiana. It is expected to
reach Jupiter�s moons in 2031, which it will investigate for signs of life in
their oceans beneath their icy crusts.
27 August 2016, The NASA space probe Juno
successfully skimmed the planet Jupiter,
the start of an 18-month mission to gather data on the planet.
5 July 2016, The space
probe Juno entered polar orbit around
Jupiter.
5 August 2011, The Juno
space probe was launched towards Jupiter.
21 September 2003. The
Galileo space probe ended its mission with a plunge into Jupiter�s atmosphere.
15 October 2001, The Galileo spacecraft came to within 180 km of Jupiter�s moon, Io.
2 March 1998, Data sent from the Galileo probe indicated that
Jupiter�s Moon Europa had an ocean of liquid water beneath a frozen crust of
ice.
7 December 1995, The space probe Galileo entered orbit around Jupiter, and
sent a probe into the planet�s atmosphere.
18 July 1994, Fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy were
observed by the Hubble telescope crashing into Jupiter.
4 March 1979, Voyager 1 photographed Jupiter�s rings,
approaching within 290,000 kilometres of the planet on 5 March 1979.
20 August 1977. The Voyager I space craft was launched on a
journey via Jupiter and Saturn, later to become the first man-made object to
leave the solar system.
3 December 1973, The
Pioneer 10 spacecraft captured the first close-up images of Jupiter,
6 April 1973, The space
probe Pioneer 11 was launched. Passing Jupiter a year after Pioneer 10 it
continued on to Saturn, which it reached in 1979.
3 March 1972, The space
probe Pioneer 10 was launched. It became the first probe to cross the asteroid
belt, crossing it between July 1972 and February 1973. It arrived at Jupiter in
December 1973. It has now left the solar system and is predicted to reach the
red star Aldebaran in 2 million years� time.
25 March 1923, Kenneth Lynn Franklin was born in Alameda,
California. In 1955 he and Burke detected radio emissions from Jupiter.
1878,
The Great Red Spot became prominent,
darkening from pale pink to brick red across an area 7,000 by 30,000 miles. Schwabe
had noted the spot in 1831, and Hooke had seen it back in 1664.
1671, Csssini discovered Iapetus, a
satellite of Jupiter.
9 May 1664, Robert Hooke first noted Jupiter�s Great Red
Spot, also discovering the rotation of Jupiter.
17 May 1630, The belts of the planet Jupiter were first
observed.
7 January 1610, Galileo
first observed four of the moons of
Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto).
Mars exploration
14 May 2021, China landed its first
probe on Mars.
19 April 2021, The first controlled
flight on another planet was achieved by NASA when it flew a remote-controlled
1.8 kg helicopter on Mars.
6 August 2012, Curiosity, the
US space probe, successfully landed on Mars.
26 November 2011, The US
launched its probe Curiosity towards
Mars.
25 May 2008, NASA successfully landed a probe on the north
polar regions of Mars.
29
September 2006, The
HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took its first low-orbit,
high-resolution pictures of Mars
23 January 2004, The Mars
Express space probe found evidence of frozen water at Mars� south pole.
28 October 2003, A solar flare put the radiation sensor on
the 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft out
of action. It had been intended to measure the radiation hazard to any future
human colonists on Mars.
4 January 2004, Nasa landed a robotic space probe on Mars.
25 December
2003, The
British-built Beagle� 2 space probe went
silent and vanished, just before its scheduled landing on Mars.
10 June 2003, The Mars Spirit Rover p[robe was launched.
It reached Mars after 6 months, and collected valuable geological data, also
suggesting the presence of water.
19 February
2002, NASA�s
Mars Odyssey probe began to map the
surface of Mars.
24 October 2001, The 2001
Mars Odyssey spacecraft reached Mars and went into orbit.
7 April 2001, The 2001
Mars Odyssey spacecraft was launched from the Kennedy Space centre.
3 December 1999, NASA lost contact with the probe Mars Polar Lander at it attempted to
touch down at the south pole of Mars.
23
September 1999, NASA lost
contact with its Mars probe Climate
Orbiter.
3 January 1999, The USA launched the MPL probe, to investigate the
surface of Mars.
11 December 1998, The Mars Climate Orbiter was launched from Cape Canaveral;
the craft was later lost because one team was using metric and another using
imperial measurements.
27 September 1997, The Pathfinder
probe on Mars ceased functioning, after 2 months on the planet�s surface.
4 July 1997, NASA�s Pathfinder probe landed on the surface of
Mars.
4 December 1996,� NASA launched
the Pathfinder probe towards Mars.
7 November 1996, The USA launched the MGS (Mars Global Survey) space probe.
7 July 1988, The first
of two Soviet probes was sent to study Phobos, a moon of Mars. The second probe
was launched on 12 January 1988. Later, Phobos I was accidentally sent a
�suicide� instruction.
12 January 1988, The USSR
launched Phobos-2, to rendezvous with the Martian moon, Phobos.
3 September 1976. The US
spacecraft Viking 2 landed on Mars after a journey lasting 359 days. It landed
in the Utopia Planitia region and broadcast back the first colour pictures of
the planet.
7 August 1976. The Viking 2 probe entered orbit around
Mars.
20 July 1976. The US
spacecraft Viking I landed on Mars after an 11-month journey from Earth.
On 31 July 1976 NASA released the famous �face on Mars� photograph.
20 August 1975, NASA
launched the Viking I probe towards Mars.
3 January 1972, Mariner
9 began the first mapping of Mars, after dust storms on the planet had
ceased.
27 November 1971, The Soviet space probe Mars 2 went into orbit round Mars, just days after the US probe Mariner 9 arrived there.
13 November 1971, Mariner
9 went into orbit around Mars, the first man-made object to orbit another
planet. Initially dust storms obscured any view, but eventually the spacecraft
returned 7,329 pictures of the planet�s surface.
30 May 1971, Mariner 9
was launched by the US at Cape Kennedy on a mission to Mars.
25 February 1969, Mariner
6 was launched from Cape Canaveral, to fly by Mars.
15 July 1965, Mariner 4 flew by Mars, returning images of
the planet�s surface. It revealed that Mars was covered with impact craters,
demonstrating a lack of geological activity. A measurement of the changes in
radio transmissions as the signals passed through the Martian atmosphere also
showed that surface pressure was 94% less than had been predicted, at about 1%
of Earth sea level pressure and was mostly carbon dioxide and that the Martian
ice caps were actually frozen CO2.
28 November 1964, Mariner 4 was
launched; 228 days later it passed within 9,700 kilometres of Mars.
1963, The space probe Mars I orbited Mars.
12 April 1963, Using the 100-inch reflecting telescope on
Mount Palomar, astronomers detected ,minute amounts of water vapour in the
Martian atmosphere, perhaps just .0075 millimetres of water if precipitated.
1877, Schiaparelli drew a map
of Mars; he assumed the dark areas were sea, the ochre area was desert and the
white areas were water ice caps. By 1900 it was known that the Martian
atmosphere was far too thin for open water to exist; the dark areas were
presumed to be vegetation, perhaps moss or lichen, since it was also known that
Mars is very cold.
11 August 1877, The two
small moons of Mars (Phobos, Deimos) were first seen by US astronomer Asaph
Hall.
1671, Cassini calculated the distance
from Earth to Mars. From this he deduced the distances of all the planets from
the Sun.
Mercury exploration
29 March 1974. The US spacecraft Mariner 10 sent back the first photos of the planet Mercury.
3 November 1973, The USA launched the Mariner-10 space probe. It made 1 flyby of Venus then 3 flybys of
Mercury.
7 November 1631, Pierre Gassendi observed the transit of
Mercury across the Sun.� This was the
first observation of a planetary transit.
1881, Schiaparelli (1835 � 1910) began
a series of observations of the surface features of Mercury. He calculated its
rotational period (day) as 88 days; it is now known to be 59 days. This is
two-thirds of a Mercury year,
Moon exploration
23 November 2020, China launched its Chang�e 5 probe towards
the Moon.
21 February 2019, An Israeli company launched the Beresheet
probe towards the Moon
7 December 2018, China launched its Chang�e 4 probe towards
the Moon; landed there 3 January 2019.
1 December 2013, China launched the Chang�e 3 probe towards
the moon, with the lunar rover Yutu.
18 June 2009, The US Moon probe LCross was launched, It
discovered water on the Moon.
22 October 2008, India launched its probe Chandrayaan 1
towards the Moon.
24 October 2007, China launched its first space probe,
Chang�e 1, towards the Moon.
14 September 2007, Japan launched its Kaguya probe towards the
Moon
14 January 2004, US President Bush announced a proposal to
establish a permanent manned base on the Moon by 2020, to act as a staging post
for manned missions to Mars by 2030. The cost was estimated at between US$ 300
and 500 billion.
27 September 2003, The first European Moon probe, SMART-1, was
launched towards the Moon.
5 March 1998, The NASA Satellite Lunar Prospector discovered ice
beneath the lunar surface at the South Pole.
6 January 1998, The USA launched the Lunar Prospector space probe, to
map the lunar surface.
24 January 1990, Japan sent
the first probe to the Moon since 1976. It placed a small satellite in lunar
orbit.
9 August 1976, Russia
launched the Luna 24 probe towards
the Moon
28 October 1974, Russia
launched the Luna 23 probe towards
the Moon.
8 January 1973. Russia
launched the Luna 21 probe towards
the Moon
7 December 1972, The US
spacecraft Apollo 17 was launched,
crewed by Eugene
Cernan, Ronald Evans and Dr Harrison Schmitt.� Cernan and Schmitt made the 6th
Moon landing.
20 April 1972. Apollo 16 landed on the Moon.
16 April 1972, Apollo
16 was launched with John Young, Charles Duke, and Thomas
Mattingley. Young and Duke made the 5th Moon landing.
14 February 1972, Russia
launched the Luna 20 probe towards
the Moon.
5 February 1971. US
spacecraft Apollo 14, launched on 31
January 1971, landed on the Moon. Mitchell. Shephard and Mitchell
made the 3rd Moon landing.
31 January 1971, The US
spacecraft, �Apollo 14, the third mission to the Moon,
was launched with a three-man crew. On board were Alan Shephard, Stuart Roosa,
and Edgar
17 November 1970. The
unmanned Russian spacecraft Luna 17
landed on the Moon and released the first moon walker vehicle.
Apollo 13 � Disaster
averted
17 April 1970, The Apollo
13 astronauts were rescued after their craft failed 200,000 miles from Earth
and they had to navigate back home by the Sun. They crashed into the Pacific
Ocean and were picked up by the US Navy. Apollo
13 was launched on 11 April 1970. An oxygen tank in the service module
exploded, destroying both oxygen tanks and blowing the side off the service
module; this was later determined by NASA to have been caused by wires in a fan
thermostat having been tested at too high a voltage, burning off the insulation
and causing a short circuit when the fan was activated. There was now
insufficient oxygen for both power and breathing.� The three astronauts retreated to the lunar
module, designed only for two people, and shut down the main module until
required for the Earth landing. Having reported the famous words �Houston we have
a problem� the astronauts had no option but to continue out to orbit the Moon,
being out of Earth contact for a period, until returning home.
11 April 1970, The US
spacecraft Apollo 13 was launched.
14 November 1969. The US
launched Apollo 12, crewed by Charles Conrad, Richard Gordon, and Alan Bean.� Conrad and Bean made the 2nd
Moon landing on 19 November 1969.
13 July 1969, Russia
launched the Luna 15 probe towards
the Moon.
Apollo 11 � First Moon landing achieved
24 July 1969, The Apollo 11 astronauts returned
successfully to earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.
22 July 1969, Apollo 11 left the Moon.
20 July 1969. Neil Armstrong
became the first man on the Moon.
He said, as he emerged from the Eagle lunar module, �One small step for
man, one giant leap for mankind�.� The Eagle
had separated from the Apollo 11 spacecraft.�� See 7
October 1968 and 19 November 1969. The Apollo 11 mission had launched from
Cape Canaveral on 16 July 1969.
24 December 1968, The
Apollo 8 astronauts became the first humans to orbit the Moon, flying 110 km
above its surface.
21 December 1968. The first
flight of a man around the Moon, when Apollo
8 was launched.� It was crewed by Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders.
14 September 1968, The USSR
launched the Zond-5 spacecraft, which
carried animals around the Moon.
9 January 1968, The space
probe Surveyor 7 landed
near the lunar crater Tycho.
7 January 1968, Sunday (+8,279) NASA launched the Surveyor
7 probe towards the Moon.
9
November 1967, US space probe Surveyor VI soft-landed on
the Moon.
4 May 1967, Thursday (+8,031) NASA launched the Lunar Orbiter 4 probe towards the Moon.
It took the first photographs of the lunar south pole before crashing.
17 April 1967, NASA launched the Surveyor 3 probe towards the Moon
13 December 1966, Russia launched the Luna 13 probe towards the Moon.
6 November 1966, NASA launched the Lunar Orbiter 2 probe towards the Moon
20 September 1966, NASA launched the Surveyor 2 probe towards the Moon
10 August 1966, America�s
first Moon satellite, Orbiter 1, was launched.
2 June 1966. The US
unmanned spacecraft Surveyor 1 made the
first soft landing on the Moon.
30 May 1966, NASA launched the Surveyor 1
probe towards the Moon
3 February 1966, The
Soviet unmanned spacecraft, Luna 9 made the first soft landing on the
Moon.
15 December 1965, US
astronauts achieved the first rendezvous of twchedo vehicles in space. Gemini
6, crewed by Walter
P Shirra and Thomas P Stafford, met alongside Gemini 7,
crewed by Frank
Borman and James A Lovell. The two craft then orbited
together, about 3 metres apart, completing two earth orbits at an altitude of
315 kilometres. This exercise was vital in planning the manned lunar programme,
where a lunar module would detach from the command ship to land on the Moon,
then rejoin the main ship to return to Earth.
3 December 1965, Russia
launched the Luna 8 probe towards the
Moon
13 May 1965, The
Russian Luna 5 space probe, intended
to explore the possibility of landing safely on the Moon, malfunctioned and
crashed onto its surface.
9 May 1965, Russia
launched the Luna 5 probe towards the
Moon
21 March 1965, NASA
launched the lunar probe Ranger 9 towards the Moon
17 February 1965, Lunar
probe Ranger 8 was launched from Cape
Canaveral. The photographs it transmitted would help select landing sites for
future Apollo missions.
31 July 1964, NASA
succeeded in landing the Ranger 7
probe on the Moon.
28 July 1964, NASA
launched the Ranger 7 probe towards
the Moon
26 October 1963, Khrushchev said the USSR would not race the US to get a man
on the Moon.
13 November 1962. America
launched its biggest rocket yet, the Saturn booster, in its effort to reach the Moon.
9 September 1962. President
Kennedy called for the USA to launch a full speed drive for the Moon
and first place in space over Russia, so that space will be an area of peace
and not a terrifying theatre of war.
27 January 1962, An
unmanned US craft passed within 20,000 miles of the moon.
7 October 1959, The first
photographs of the far side of the Moon were transmitted by the Russian
spacecraft Lunik III.
14 September 1959, The first
man-made object landed on the Moon; the Russian space probe Luna II,
near the Mare Serenitatis.
12 September 1959, Russia
launched the lunar probe Luna II.
2 January 1959, The
Russians launched Luna 1, the first
rocket to pass near the Moon, from Tyuratam.
14 March 1934, Eugene Cernan,
one of the sixth pair of US astronauts to land on the Moon, was born in
Chicago, Illinois.
31 October 1930, Michael Collins,
US astronaut who piloted the command module during the first Moon landing, was
born in Rome, Italy.
24 September 1930, John Young,
US astronaut, whose spacecraft made the 5th landing on the Moon, was
born in San Francisco, California.
5 August 1930. Birth of
US astronaut Neil
Armstrong, first man on the Moon, in Wapakoneta, Ohio.
2 June 1930, Charles Conrad,
American astronaut whose spacecraft made the second landing on the Moon, was
born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
11 April 1930. US
scientists predicted that man would have landed on the Moon by 2050.
20 January 1930. Edwin �Buzz� Aldrin, second
man on the Moon, was born at Glen Ridge, New Jersey.
1929,
4 May 1783,
Astronomer William
Herschel reported seeing a red glow near the lunar crater
Aristarchus.
1679, Cassini published a map of the Moon.
30 November 1609, In Padua,
Galileo,
using his newly invented telescope, made detailed drawings of the Moon, noting
the irregularities on its surface.
18 June 1178, A violent
explosion was seen on the face of the Moon. Later, astronomers calculated this
may have been the meteor that created the crater known as Giordano Bruno.
Neptune exploration
1989,
Proteus, moon of Neptune, was first observed.
25 August 1989. Voyager 2
sent back pictures of Neptune and its moon, Triton, flying within 5,000
kilometres of the planet.
1949, Nereid, moon
of Neptune, was first observed.
10 July 1910, Johann Galle, German astronomer who made the first
observation of the planet Neptune, died.
21 January 1892, John Couch Adams, English astronomer associated with
the discovery of the planet Neptune, died.
10 October 1846, Triton, moon of Neptune, was first observed
by English astronomer William Lassell.
23 September 1846, German astronomer Johann
Galle discovered the planet Neptune.� This followed predictions made by Leverrier
and Adams.
1828, The planet Uranus was
found to have deviated so much from its predicted position that the search for
another planet began; this led to the discovery of Neptune in 1846.
1822, Alexis Boulevard (born
Contamines, France, 27 June 1767) examined observations of the planet Uranus and found they did not agree.
This information was used to deduce the existence of a further planet, Neptune.
5 June 1819, John Couch Adams, who co-discovered Neptune,
was born near Launceston, Cornwall.
28 January 1613, Galileo
noted the undiscovered planet Neptune but failed to realise what it was.
Neptune was officially discovered 233 years later by John Couch Adams.
Pluto exploration
14 July 2015, The space probe
New Horizons reached Pluto.
24 August 2006, Pluto was
officially demoted from �planet� to �dwarf planet� by the International
Astronomical Union,
19 January 2006, The New Horizons
space probe was launched towards Pluto.
1980, A thin
atmosphere was discovered on Pluto.
22 June 1978, Charon, a
satellite of Pluto, was discovered.
13 March 1930, The discovery of Pluto was announced this day.
18 February 1930. American
astronomer Clyde
Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto from a series of pictures taken
during the previous month at the Lowell Observatory.
12 November 1916, Percival Lowell, US astronomer who predicted
the existence of the planet Pluto prior to its discovery in 1930, died in
Flagstaff, Arizona.
Saturn exploration
15 September 2017, The Cassini
spacecraft, which had been orbiting Saturn since 2004, dived into Saturn�s
atmosphere to be destroyed. The spacecraft had almost run out of fuel, making
it uncontrollable. This was to ensure the spacecraft did not crash into
Enceladus, where a subsurface ocean of liquid water is believed to exist, and
possibly contaminate it with terrestrial bacteria.
11 June 2004, The Cassini-Huygens US-European space mission (launched 1997) began a
4-year exploration of Saturn, its rings and satellites.
15 October 1997, The Cassini space probe was launched. It plunged into the
planet�s atmosphere to destruction on 15 September 2017.
12 November 1979, The NASA
probe Voyager 1 passed within 140,000 kilometres of Saturn, taking high-resolution
pictures of the cloud tops.
1 September 1979, The US
spacecraft Pioneer 1 visited Saturn,
passing by the planet 21,000 kilometres away.
20 August 1977. The Voyager I space craft was launched on a
journey via Jupiter and Saturn, later to become the first man-made object to
leave the solar system.
5 September 1977, The US
launched the Voyager 2 spacecraft to add to the information gathered by Voyager
1 on Saturn.� It continued on to
Uranus, then to Neptune, where it arrived in September 1989, its last planetary
visit.
6 April 1973, The space
probe Pioneer 11 was launched. Passing Jupiter a year after Pioneer 10 it
continued on to Saturn, which it
reached in 1979.
3 August 1933, Thursday (-4,296) WH Tay,
British astronomer, found� a prominent white
spot on Saturn.
1898,
Phoebe, moon of Saturn, was discovered by WH Pickering.
1848, Hyperion, moon
of Saturn, was first observed.
17 September 1789, Herschel,
using a large 40-ft focal length reflector telescope,� first observed Saturn�s satellite, Mimas.
Saturn was now known to have seven satellites.
28 August 1789, Astronomer William
Herschel first observed Saturn�s satellite, Enceladus.
1684, Cassini
discovered Dione and Tethys, satellites of Saturn.
1675,
Cassini
discovered that the rings of Saturn are separated by breaks, still known as the
Cassini Divisions.
1672, Cassini discovered Rhea, a
satellite of Saturn.
1671, Iapetus, moon of Saturn,
was first observed.
25 March 1655, Titan, the largest moon of
Saturn, was discovered by Christiaan Huygens.
Sun exploration
31 May 2006, Raymond
Davis, astrophysicist (solar neutrinos),
died (born 14 October 1914).
2 December 1995, The USA
launched SOHO, a space probe to monitor solar activity.
13 September 1994, The unmanned Ulysses probe passed the Sun�s south pole, revealing much
information about our star.
6 October 1990, The
Ulysses space probe was launched. It went into polar orbit around the Sun,
investigating its north and south poles. The probe was decommissioned on 30
June 2009.
1942,
The Sun�s radio emissions were first discovered by the British scientist Robert Hey.���������� However at the time the radio noise
was attributed to jamming by the Germans.
1938, The German-born US
physicist Hans
Boethe (2 July 1906 � 6 March 2005) began to work out the nuclear
reactions that produce energy within the Sun. he received a Physics Nobel Prize
for this work in 1967.
25 January 1938. The aurora borealis, or northern lights,
were seen as far south as London�s West End and throughout Western Europe. It
was due to intense sunspot activity.
3 January 1908, A total solar eclipse was visible across
the south-western Pacific.
2 July 1906, German physicist Hans Bethe was born in
Strasbourg. In 1938 he proposed that stellar fusion of hydrogen into helium was
how the Sun produced energy.
1860, Warren de la Rue showed that the
prominences visible during a solar eclipse come from the Sun, not the Moon.
1860, Fraunhofer Lines in the light emitted by the Sun were identified as
corresponding to the emission frequencies of light emitted by certain elements
heated to incandescence. This discovery was made by German scientists Gustav
Kirchhoff (1824-87) and Robert Bunsen (1811-99), who also invented the
Bunsen burner. The dark lines in the Sun�s spectrum had been first spotted by
English scientist William Wollaston in 1802; he thought they
were merely boundaries between the various colours. Joseph von Fraunhofer studied
the lines more closely and plotted 574 of them. Some 25,000 such lines are now
known to exist in the Sun�s light, and that from other stars, identifying which
chemical elements are present in those stars.
1859, Richard Christopher Carrington
(born 26 May 1826 in London) discovered that the Sun does not rotate uniformly.
Regions near its poles rotate every 25 days but the equator rotates every 27.5
days.
2 September 1859, The
Carrington Event. A massive solar flare hit the Earth, causing the Aurora
to be seen as far south as the Caribbean, and as far north as Santiago, Chile.
Telegraph lines and machines were disrupted by the energy surge. The event is named
after amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who first spotted the
solar flare.
1843, German amateur astronomer Heinrich
Schwabe worked out that the length of the sunspot cycle on the Sun
was 11 years. He had initially been looking for a hypothetical planet closer to
the Sun than Mercury.
1826, Heinrich Samuel Schwabe began
regular observations of sunspots, leading to the discovery of the 11-year
sunspot cycle.
7 June 1826, Joseph von Fraunhofer, best known for his
study of absorption lines in the Sun�s spectrum, now known as Fraunhofer Lines, died (born 6 March 1787).
1814, German astronomer Joseph von
Fraunhofer, born 6 March 1787l, made detailed chart of the dark
lines in the Sun�s spectrum.
1802, William Hyde Wollaston (born
East Dereham, England, 6 August 1766) noticed dark lines in the Sun�s spectrum,
but failed to realise their significance. Joseph von Fraunhofer, who observed them in
1814, realised their importance.
6 March 1787, Joseph von Fraunhofer, best known for his
study of absorption lines in the Sun�s spectrum, now known as Fraunhofer Lines, was born (died 7 June
1826).
29 March 1652, �Black Monday� � a total eclipse of the Sun
in Britain
caused anxiety.
1610, Sun spots �first�
observed by Harriott,
Fabricias,
and Scheiner.
968, The Byzantine historian Leo Diaconus
made the first recorded reference to the Sun�s corona.
28 BCE, Chinese astronomers began keeping
systematic records of sunspots.
265 BCE, Aristarchus of Samos estimated
the distance between the Earth and the Sun by observing the angle between Sun
and Moon when the Moon was exactly half-full.
17 July 709 BCE, An eclipse of the Sun was recorded
in China.
19 March 721 BCE, An eclipse of the Sun was
recorded by the Babylonians.
3 May 1375 BCE, The first total eclipse of
the Sun recorded outside China, by the Babylonians.
21 October 2137 BCE. The first recorded total
eclipse of the sun, in China.
Uranus exploration
24 January 1986. US spacecraft Voyager 2 passed within 51,000 miles of the cloud tops of Uranus.
The space probe detected an ocean of water some 6,000 miles deep.
1976, The rings of Uranus were
discovered.
1948, Miranda, moon of Uranus,
was first observed.
24 October 1851, Ariel and Umbriel, two moons of Uranus,
were first observed.
25 August 1822, The astronomer Sir William Herschel died.� He discovered Uranus in 1781.
11 January 1787, William Herschel observed Uranus through his new large
(20 ft focal length) reflector telescope, and first saw its satellites, Titania
and Oberon.
13 March 1781, Astronomer William Herschel
discovered the planet Uranus, although initially he mistook it for a comet. He
called it Georgium Sidus (George�s Star) in honour of King George III.
15 November 1738, Sir William Herschel, who discovered Uranus in
1781, was born in Hanover, Germany.
Venus exploration
12 October 1994, The Magellan mission to
Venus ended when radio contact with the probe was lost and the spacecraft burnt
up in the atmosphere of the planet.
10 August 1990, The Magellan space probe reached Venus.
4 May 1989, The US space
shuttle launched the Magellan probe
to make a radar map of the surface of Venus.
4 November 1982, Soft
landing on Venus by the Soviet space probe Venera 14.
1 March 1982, Soft
landing on Venus by the Soviet space probe Venera 13.
9 December 1978, Two US
spacecraft reached Venus, sending back pictures of its surface hidden below
clouds. On 5 December 1978 the Pioneer I
craft went into orbit around Venus, analysing the atmosphere and mapping the
surface by radar. This day the Pioneer 2
craft launched probes which landed, surviving the hellish conditions for four
hours.
8 June 1975, The USSR
launched the Venera 9 probe towards Venus. It landed
on the surface, transmitting data and pictures for 53 minutes.
5 February 1974. The US
spacecraft Mariner 10 sent back
pictures of Venus.
3 November 1973, The USA launched the Mariner-10 space probe. It made 1 flyby of Venus then 3 flybys of
Mercury.
22 July 1972, The Russian space probe Venera 8 landed on Venus.
27 March 1972, Russia
launched the space probe Venera 8 towards
Venus.
15 December 1970, The Russian Venera-7 probe landed
on Venus.
17 August 1970, Monday
(+9,232) The USSR launched the Venera-7 space probe
to make a soft landing on Venus.
16 May 1969, The
Russian spacecraft Venus 5 touched down on Venus.
18 October 1967, The Soviet
space probe Venera 4 made the first soft landing on Venus.
12 June 1967, Venera 4 was launched toward Venus by the
Soviet Union.
1 March 1966, The
Russian spacecraft Venera
3 became the first man-made object to land on another planet when it made a
hard landing on Venus. It had been launched on 16 November 1965.
16 November 1965, The Russians
launched Venera 3 on a voyage to Venus.
26 February 1963, Mariner II discovered that Venus has no
magnetic field, and is too hot for human exploration, or for any form of life.
14 December 1962. Mariner II sent back the first close-up
pictures of the planet Venus. �Venus was
found to be rotating �backwards�.
27 August 1962, The US
spacecraft Mariner II was launched, on a space mission, to Venus.
1961, The Soviet space probe Venera I orbited
Venus.
1932, T Dunham detected carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere of Venus.
1761, The atmosphere of Venus
was first observed by Mikhail Vasilyevich whilst observing a transit
of the planet across the Sun.