Rome Star Gazers

April 28, 1928: Eugene Merle Shoemaker was born (1928–1997).    Dr. Shoemaker spent his professional life in the quest of learning all he could about impact craters and orbit-crossing asteroids.  He received a National Medal of Science in 1992 and in 1993 co-discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 which collided with Jupiter in 1994.  One of his aspirations was to be an astronaut and go to the Moon but was thwarted by a medical condition.  After an untimely accidental death, Dr. Shoemaker’s cremated remains were carried to the Moon by the Lunar Prospector space probe.  He is considered the “Father” of the science of Near-Earth Objects.

Eugene Merle Shoemaker

April 28, 2001: Dennis Tito became the first “tourist” in space aboard the Soyuz TM-32.  Soyuz TM-32 is a Russian passenger craft that was launched from Baikonur by a Soyuz-U rocket. It carried a three man crew (two Russian and one American, the latter not a professional astronaut) to the International Space Station, ISS. It docked automatically with the ISS at 07:57 UT on 30 April, just a few hours after the shuttle STS 100 undocked. The crew stayed for a week.

Soyuz TM-32 Crew

May 1, 1949: Gerald Kuiper discovered Nereid, a moon of Neptune.  In his career Kuiper is also credited for discovering one of Uranus’s moon Miranda.  He was born on December 7, 1905 in North Holland and became a naturalized citizen of the United States.  He was blessed with extraordinarily sharp eyesight, allowing him to see magnitude 7.5 objects with his naked eye.  This is about four times fainter than someone with normal vision!

Nereid

May 2, 1965: the “Early Bird” satellite was used to transmit television pictures across the Atlantic.

NASA works on an Early Bird.

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April 19, 1982: Astronauts Sally Ride and Guion Bluford became the first woman, and the first African-American, to be tapped for the US space mission.

Guion Bluford

Sally Ride

April 19, 1993: Soviet / Russian cosmonauts made the 200th human space walk.  Manakov and Poleschuk relocated the drive unit for Mir’s solar panels, experiencing some difficulties, including loss into space of a handle used to operate Mir’s “crane”.

Mir and Atlantis

April 20, 1972:  The manned lunar module from Apollo 16 landed on the moon. Astronauts John Young and Charles Duke explored the moon surface the following day.

Duke on the Craters Edge

April 23, 1992: COBE satellite findings show a structure in cosmic background radiation.

April 24, 1962: MIT achieved the first satellite relay of a television signal, between Camp Park, California, and Westford, Mass.

April 24, 1970: The Peoples Republic of China launched its first satellite — known as China 1 or Mao 1 — to Earth orbit on its own “Long March” space rocket. The 390-lb. electronic ball floated around the Earth blaring the patriotic song The East Is Red.  The launch made China the fifth nation with a space rocket. Before that first successful launch, the Chinese may have sustained a launch failure in 1969. They may have suffered three failures in 1974 and another in 1979.

Long March Rocket launch.

April 24, 1990: the space shuttle Discovery (STS-31) launched from Cape Canaveral, carrying the Hubble Space Telescope.  The telescope was deployed on the following day April 25th.

STS-31 - Discovery deploys the Hubble Telescope.

April 25, 1983: the spacecraft Pioneer 10 crossed Pluto’s orbit, speeding on its endless voyage through the Milky Way.

April 25, 1990: Hubble Space Telescope’s birthday.  Hubble Space Telescope was deployed from STS-31 Discovery launching a new era in observational space exploration.

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