Rome Star Gazers

September 14, 1959: The Soviet space probe Luna 2 became the first man-made object to reach the moon as it crashed into the lunar surface.

September 15, 1965: The TV series “Lost in Space” premiered.  The storyline concerned the $40 billion launch of the Gemini 12 on October 16, 1997. The world’s first space family was selected to colonize a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system. The family was headed by Professor John Robinson (Guy Williams), his wife Maureen (June Lockhart) and their children, Judy, Penny and Will (played by Marta Kristen, Angela Cartwright and Billy Mumy, respectively). Major Don West (Mark Goddard) was the spaceship’s pilot. They would all be frozen in suspended animation for a 98-year journey.
It is interesting to note that for years there has been some confusion about the name of the robot in the series.  The original television series *never* gave the robot a name, so it is simply referred to as “Robot.” Dick Tufeld provided the voice and actor Bob May actually “worked” the Robot from inside (and to this day, he is the only one who is allowed to appear in the Robot’s body/costume in public.)
Many folks, including me, though that the robot was called “Robby” – which, as any diehard sci-fi buff will remember, is the name of the robot from the 1956 movie “Forbidden Planet” — which was an adaption of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  The confusion is understandable because both robots were designed by the same man — Robert Kinoshita.  For more on this you can go to http://www.lostinspacetv.com/.

September 15, 1967: Mariner 4 was cruising the dark emptiness between Earth and Mars after having made the first successful flyby of Mars in ‘65.  Without enough fuel to turn around and go back to Earth, there was nothing else to do but drift around. All was quiet. Fuel was running low. Soon, Mariner 4 would fade into history.  That’s when the meteor storm hit.  “For about 45 minutes the spacecraft experienced a shower of meteoroids more intense than any Leonid meteor storm we’ve ever seen on Earth,” according to Bill Cooke, the head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, AL. The impacts ripped away bits of insulation and temporarily changed the craft’s orientation in space. “It was a complete surprise.” or almost 40 years the source of the shower remained a mystery. But now, meteor expert Paul Wiegert of the University of Western Ontario may have cracked the case. The culprit, he believes, is a “dark comet” named D/1895 Q1 (Swift) or “D/Swift” for short.

September 17, 1962: U. S. space officials announced the selection of nine new astronauts, including Neil Armstrong, who became the first man to step on the moon.

September 17, 1976: NASA unveiled the space shuttle Enterprise in Palmdale, California.  Enterprise was the first Space Shuttle Orbiter and was originally to be named Constitution (in honor of the U.S. Constitution’s Bicentennial). However, viewers of the popular TV Science Fiction show Star Trek started a write-in campaign urging the White House to rename the vehicle to Enterprise.  While at the Dryden Research Facility it underwent much testing, including powerless flight tests. Finally on Nov. 18, 1985, Enterprise was ferried to Dulles Airport, Washington, D.C., and became the property of the Smithsonian Institution.  If you wonder why you never heard of an Enterprise shuttle mission, it is no wonder, the Enterprise was built as a test vehicle and is not equipped for space flight.

On September 19, 1959: Physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison published the first scientific article on searching for radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligent life.

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September 1, 1979: Pioneer 11 is first Earth based spacecraft to fly past Saturn.

September 3, 1976:  The unmanned spacecraft, Viking 2, landed on Mars to take the first close-up color photos of that planet.

September 3, 2006: SMART-1 spacecraft was intentionally crashed into the Moon.  It was a Swedish-designed European Space Agency satellite orbited around the Moon. It was launched on September 27, 2003 at 23:14 UTC from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana.  “SMART” stands for Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology. On September 3, 2006 (05:42 UTC), SMART-1 was deliberately crashed into the Moon’s surface, ending its mission.  Scientists hope that the impact would kick up enough fresh lunar “soil” that they may study its composition.

September 5, 1977: Voyager 1 was launched by NASA from Cape Canaveral aboard a Titan IIIE Centaur rocket.  The Voyager 1 spacecraft is an 815-kilogram unmanned probe of the outer solar system and beyond and is currently operational. It is the farthest human-made object from Earth. The Voyager 1 spacecraft has moved into the solar system’s final frontier, a vast area where the Sun’s influence gives way to interstellar space. At 14 billion kilometers (95 astronomical units or 8.8 billion miles) from the Sun, signals from Voyager 1 take more than thirteen hours to reach its control center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California.  By the way, this was this probe that the movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, featured near its conclusion.

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August 24, 1989: The Voyager 2 space probe flew by Neptune, sending back striking photographs from a distance of some 63,000 miles from the ringed planet.

August 25, 1981: Voyager 2 came within 63,000 miles of Saturn’s cloud cover, sending back photos and data.

August 27, 1962: The US launched the Mariner 2 space probe, which flew past Venus in the following December.

August 27, 1984: The Teacher in Space program was announced.  A year and a half later, the Space Shuttle Challenger, carrying Teacher / Astronaut, Christa McAuliffe, launched on January 28, 1986 and went into the history books.

August 28, 1789: William Herschel discovered Enceladus, the sixth largest moon of Saturn.  Enceladus, with a diameter of 310 miles, is about one tenth as large as the Earth’s moon.  By Saturn’s standard it is a fairly large moon.  The surface of Enceladus has some areas with craters and some areas that are smooth.  It is thought that the smooth areas are fairly young resurfaced areas formed from cryovolcanic activity.

August 29, 1965: Gemini 5, carrying astronauts Gordon Cooper and Charles “Pete” Conrad splashed down in the Atlantic after eight days in space.

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August 17, 1877: Asaph Hall discovers Phobos and Deimos, two moons of Mars.  Born in Goshen, Connecticut and educated largely at home by his father.  At thirteen, he became an apprentice carpenter after both of his parents died.  After studying one year at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he became an assistant at the Harvard College Observatory.  When he left in 1863 for the U.S. Naval Observatory, he was in charge of its great refractor, located at Foggy Bottom on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.  On August 17, 1877 he saw “a faint star near Mars” which turned out to be outer and inner satellites of Mars.  Hall named them Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Flight) after the attendants of Mars mentioned in Homer’s Iliad.  Word came from the Paris Observatory that this was “one of the most important discoveries of modern astronomy.”  In 1879, Hall was presented the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Great Britain.

August 18, 1868: Sir J. Norman Lockyer (1836-1920) discovers helium in the Sun.  He was a British astronomer and a respected scientist in his day.  In 1869, he founded and served as editor of the prestigious scientific journal Nature and in 1885 he was appointed the world’s first professor of astronomical physics at the Royal College of Science, South Kensington, London (now part of Imperial College).  As a scientist he is remembered chiefly for his work on the sun and in particular for his discovery of helium in its atmosphere.  Because of his application of physics to astronomical studies, he is regarded as one of the founders of astro-physics.
Today Lockyer is perhaps better known for his astronomical interpretations of ancient and prehistoric sites.  Working on the presumption that the midsummer sun rose originally over the Heel Stone of Stonehenge, Lockyer attempted to calculate back from the point where the sun now rose on midsummer’s dawn in 1901 to determine when it would have risen precisely over the Heel Stone and thereby establish the date when Stonehenge was built.

August 19, 1646: John Flamsteed was born, died December 31, 1719.  John Flamsteed was the son of a prosperous merchant in Denby near Derby, Derbyshire, England.  He studied astronomy between 1662 and 1669 on his own and opposed by his father.  Flamsteed was employed by King Charles II as Britain’s first Royal Astronomer on March 4, 1675.  The Royal Observatory at Greenwich was built for him but he had to fund and bring his own instruments.  He was elected to the Royal Society in 1677.
His main work was collecting improved observations and position measurements for stars, which finally led to the compilation of a large catalog, Historia Coelestis Britannica, and an atlas of stars, Atlas Coelestis.  A lifelong feud between Flamsteed and Edmond Halley grew out of Flamsteed’s refusal to publish his observations.  In 1704 Halley obtained the cost for publication of the work from Prince George of Denmark, and despite the prince’s death in 1708 and Flamsteed’s objections.  400 copies of the Historia Coelestis Britannica was published by Halley in 1712.   In retaliation, with the help of Lord Chamberlain, in 1715, Flamsteed obtained about 300 copies of the work and burned them. It is this unauthorized publication where the famous so-called “Flamsteed Numbers” (star magnitudes) were assigned to the brighter stars of each constellation.

August 19, 1982: Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the second woman in space aboard Soyuz-T7.  Later, on July 25, 1984, Svetlana Savitskaya then became the first woman to walk in space. She, along with fellow cosmonaut, Vladimir Dzhanibekov, conducted experiments on the Salyut 7 space station. The walk lasted 3.58 hours and was part of the Soyuz T-12 mission, Savitskaya’s last mission.

August 20, 1977:  The US launched Voyager 2, an unmanned spacecraft carrying a 12-inch copper phonograph record containing greetings in dozens of languages, samples of music, and sounds of nature, hoping for a response from any other minds in the universe.  It is interesting to wonder what medium we would use today if we were to resend this message: do you think we would use a phonograph record?  In the days of CDs and DVDs how many of us have even seen a phonograph record lately?

August 21, 1993: NASA engineers lost contact with the $980 million Mars Observer spacecraft. The final report by the independent investigation board on the failure of the Mars Observer spacecraft stated that the most probable cause of the loss of communications with the spacecraft on Aug. 21, 1993, was a rupture of the fuel pressurization side of the spacecraft’s propulsion system resulting in a net spin rate.  This high spin rate would cause the spacecraft to enter into the “contingency mode,” which prevented it from turning its transmitter on.

August 22, 1963: Under the controls of astronaut, Joe Walker, the X-15 rocket plane set a new world altitude record for a winged aircraft at 354,200 feet (a little more than 67 miles up). The X-15 program began in September 1959; 199 missions later it ended on October 24, 1968.  The record achieving mission was the X-15’s ninety-first mission.  Joe Walker hit the 354,200 feet level on his last flight.  He was one of only a handful of people to achieve astronaut status by exceeding an altitude of 50 miles; Bob White, Bob Rushmore, Joe Eagle, Bill Dana, and Pete Knight were others from the X-15 legacy.

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August 11, 1877: Asaph Hall III (October 15, 1829 – November 22, 1907) was an American astronomer who discovered Deimos, one of the two moons of Mars.

August 12, 1960: The first balloon communication satellite–the Echo 1–was launched from Cape Canaveral.

August 12, 1962: One day after launching Andrian Nikolayev into orbit, the Soviet Union sent up cosmonaut Pavel Popovich.
Both men landed safely on August 15th.

August 12, 1977: The space shuttle Enterprise passed its first solo flight test.

(Not to be confused with Space incidents, it was on August 12, 2000 that the Russian submarine Kursk went down, with a crew of 118.

August 13, 1960: The first two-way telephone conversation by satellite took place with the aid of Echo 1.

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July 26, 1971: Apollo 15 launched.  It was the fourth lunar landing mission and the first mission to use a lunar rover.

July 28, 1851: First recorded photograph of a solar eclipse was taken.

July 29, 1958: President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Act, creating NASA.

July 31, 1964: The U.S. space probe Range 7 transmitted photos of the moon’s surface.  The Ranger program was first U.S. attempt to take close-up images of the Lunar surface. The Ranger spacecraft were designed to fly straight down towards the Moon’s surface and send images back until the moment of impact. This is the first close-up picture of the Moon taken by Ranger 7 about 17 seconds before impact.  This image has a resolution of .5 meters.

July 31, 1971:  Apollo 15 astronauts Scott and Irwin drive the first lunar roving vehicle (LRV) on the Moon.  The LRV carried two astronauts, tools, scientific equipment, communications gear, and lunar samples.  The four-wheel, lightweight vehicle greatly extended the lunar area that could be explored by humans. The LRV could be operated by either astronaut.  To get the LRV into the spacecraft it must be folded up into a very small package.  After landing on the Moon, the LRV unfolded itself from its stowed configuration and deployed itself onto the lunar surface in its operational configuration, all with minimum assistance from the astronauts.

August 1, 1818: Maria Mitchell was born on the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts. She became the first acknowledged woman astronomer in the United States. In 1848, Maria became the first woman to discover a comet and in that same year she became the first women member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and later became a fellow of the society. She served as professor of astronomy at Vassar College from 1865 to 1888. In 1875 Mitchell was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Women.  Maria Mitchell died on June 28, 1889.

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July 19, 1985; Christa McAuliffe, of New Hampshire, was chosen to be the first schoolteacher to ride aboard the space shuttle.  Years later, she was among the seven who perished when the Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff.

Christa McAuliffe

July 19, 1969: Apollo XI and its astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Edwmin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins, went into orbit around the Moon.

July 20, 1969: Apollo XI landed, and Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the surface of the Moon.

Message left by Apollo 11

July 20, 1976: the U.S. Viking I robot spacecraft made a successful first-ever landing on Mars.

Viking I Spacecraft in Cleanroom

July 20, 1999: The Liberty Bell was hoisted out of the Atlantic Ocean 38 years after it flooded and sank.  Once the recovery ship, Ocean Project, had Liberty Bell 7 on deck it headed back to land where it docked at Port Canaveral, Florida (see July 21, 1961).

July 21, 1961: The Mercury capsule, Liberty Bell 7, with astronaut Guss Grissom made its 15 minute suborbital flight.  In the recovery attempt the capsule filled with water and sank to a depth of 15,000 feet in the Atlantic Ocean, 3,000 feet deeper than the wreck of the Titanic.

Liberty Bell 7

July 22, 1784: German astronomer Friedrich Bessel was born.  Bessel is credited with being the first to use parallax in calculating the distance to a star.  In 1838 he calculated that 61 Cygni had a parallax of 0.314 arcseconds, indicating that it was 3 parsecs away.  A parsec is the distance from Earth an object is with a parallax of 1 (one) arcsecond.   That distance is 3.262 light-years.

July 22, 1994: The last fragment of Comet SL-9 impacts Jupiter. From July 16 through July 22, 1994, pieces of an object designated as Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter. This is the first collision of two solar system bodies ever to be observed, and the effects of the comet impacts on Jupiter’s atmosphere have been simply spectacular and beyond expectations. Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 consisted of at least 21 identifiable fragments with diameters estimated at up to 2 kilometers.

Shoemaker-Levy 9 on the path to Jupiter

July 24, 1950: The first rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral.

The Bumper V-2 was the first missile launched at Cape Canaveral on July 24, 1950.

July 24, 1975: Apollo-Soyuz crew returned to Earth and was the last splashdown recovery.  All other successful recoveries were soft landings via Space Shuttles.

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July 14, 1965: Mariner 4 performed the first successful flyby of Mars on this day after a 7.5 month journey from Cape Canaveral.  Mariner 4 relayed back to Earth 21 photographs of Mars’ as it passed 6,105 miles above its surface.  The photographs disappointed many planetary scientists who hoped that Mars might be bounding with life. Instead the pictures showed a frozen world with a rust colored surface that was pitted with craters that more resembled the Moon than the canal-filled world envisioned by Percival Lowell around 1900.  After leaving Mars, Mariner 4 travmeled around the Sun and returned to Earth’s vicinity in 1967 where it currently is in a solar orbit.

Mariner 4's Flyby

July 15, 1975: Apollo 18, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, launched this day.  This mission was the first to dock two extremely different spacecraft, USA Apollo with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.  It would be the last Apollo mission and it would six years before an American astronaut would fly in space – aboard the reusable Space Shuttle.

Artist's Concept of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project

July 16, 1969: Apollo XI blasted off from Cape Kennedy (Canaveral) on the first manned mission to the surface of the Moon.

Apollo 11 Launch

July 16, 1994: the 21 fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 begin to crash into the surface of Jupiter, producing earth-size dark spots in the planet’s atmosphere.

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9

July 17, 1975; an Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit for the first “superpower” linkup of its kind.

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July 5, 1982: Space Shuttle Challenger arrives at Kennedy Space Center for the first time.

STS-1 Launches!

July 7, 1907: Robert A Heinlein’s birthday (07/07/07).  American author, futurist, philosopher and spaceflight advocate Robert A. Heinlein.

July 9, 1979: Voyager 2 flies past Jupiter on it way to Saturn and deep space well beyond the known planets into the distant reaches of the heliosphere (accepted boundary of solar influence, about 100 AUs from the Sun).

July 10, 1962: the Telstar communications satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Telstar 3-D communications satellite deploying from Discovery's payload bay

July 11, 1979, the abandoned U.S. space station, “Skylab” made a spectacular return to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere and showering debris over the Indian Ocean and Australia.

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June 30, 1868: George Ellery Hale, founding father of the Mt. Wilson Observatory, was born on this day. He was the force behind the founding of Palomar Observatory and the building of the 200-inch Hale telescope.

June 30, 1908: is the 100th anniversary of that ferocious meteor impact near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in remote Siberia that leveled eight hundred square miles of remote forest.  It is estimated that the space rock, about 120 feet across, entered the atmosphere of Siberia and then detonated in the sky.  It is also estimated that the asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere traveling at a speed of about 33,500 miles per hour and during its quick plunge through the atmosphere heated the air surrounding it to 44,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

July 2, 1947: an object crashed near Roswell, New Mexico.  The US Army Air Corps insisted that it was a weather balloon, but eyewitness accounts gave rise to speculation about an alien spacecraft.  That speculation persists to this day, though the US Air Force continues to disclaim it.

July 4, 1054: Chinese astronomers observed a “guest star” in and area of the sky that is now called Taurus, the Bull.  This “guest star” was actually a supernova that was as bright as Venus with a duration of 24 months.  It was reported that it could be seen in the daylight sky.   The remnant of this supernova is the Crab Nebula, M1, and can be viewed through a small telescope.

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