Apr 26 UTC

2017 – The Cassini spacecraft made close-up observations of Saturn’s north polar region, using its Optical Remote-Sensing (ORS) instruments for 16.5 hours. These instruments, including VIMS, CIRS, ISS, and UVIS, captured valuable data about Saturn’s atmosphere.

2007 – Stephen Hawking goes weightless aboard a flight operated by Zero Gravity Corporation.

“Life on Earth is at ever increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers,” Stephen Hawking said in a statement. “I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space.” — Stephen Hawking

2004 – Opportunity Mars Rover, End of Primary Mission. Opportunity operated for 5,111 Martian sols (about 15 Earth years), far exceeding its initial 90 day design lifespan. It’s end came in February 2019 due to a dust storm which covered it’s solar panels.

2003 – Soyuz TMA-2 launch as Expedition 7 to the International Space Station. Yuri Malenchenko, Edward Tsang Lu

2000 – Cosmologists reveal first detailed images of early universe. Scientists of the BOOMERANG project, using a micromesh bolometer, release images which bring the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) into sharp focus. “The images reveal  hundreds of complex regions that are visible as tiny variations — typically only 100-millionths of a degree Celsius (0.0001 C) — in the temperature of the CMB. The  complex patterns visible in the images confirm predictions of the patterns that would result from sound waves racing through the early universe, creating the structures that by now have evolved into giant clusters and super-clusters of galaxies.” Their research determines that the geometry of space is “very nearly flat.

1993 – The launch of STS-55 was the 14th flight of Shuttle Columbia. This flight was a multinational Spacelab flight involving 88 experiments from eleven different nations.  

1962 – NASA’s Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the farside Moon and although mission objectives were not reached it becomes the first US spacecraft to reach another celestial body.

1962 – The British space programme launches its first satellite, the Ariel 1.

1920 – Shapley-Curtis debate on the nature and distance of spiral nebulae, akagalaxies at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Harlow Shapley believed that the Milky Way was the entire universe, Heber Doust Curtis was an advocate of the “island universe” theory.

1803 – More than 3000 meteor fragments fall from the skies of L’Aigle, France. The subsequent investigation by Jean-Baptiste Biot convinces European sciences of the extraterrestrial origin of meteors.

Birthdays

1977 – Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency (ESA). 2009 ESA Group. Soyuz TMA-15M (Expedition 42/43)SpaceX Crew-4 (Expedition 67/68) Time In Space: 370 days, 5 hours, 45 minutes Cristoforetti holds the record for the longest uninterrupted spaceflight by a European astronaut (199 days, 16 hours), and she held the record for the longest single space flight by a woman until this was broken by Peggy Whitson in June 2017, and later by Christina Koch. Christoforetti took command of ISS Expedition 68 on 28 September 2022.