Author: cody

The moon on December 31, 2009. December 31 2011 – NASA succeeds in putting the first of two (GRAIL) Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory satellites in orbit around the moon. 2009 – Both a blue moon and a lunar eclipse occur.  

John Bahcall Happy Birthday! December 30 2000 – Cassini’s Jupiter Millennial Flyby  Cassini flys to 9,721,846 kilometers from Jupiter’s cloud tops as it gets a gravitational assist for the last leg of its journey to Saturn (2004). Circumstances puts both the Cassini and Galileo missions at Jupiter for close-up science work at the same time.…

Columbia First Roll Out Nancy Currie December 29 1980 – Space Shuttle Columbia left the VAB and rolled out to Launch Pad 39A in preparation for the first Shuttle mission, which launched on April 12, 1981. 1958 – Birthday, American Astronaut, Nancy Jane Sherlock Currie. An Engineer and Colonel in the United States Army. She…

Arthur Eddington We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about "and". December 28 1929 – Maarten Schmidt‘s Birthday, whose 1963 discovery revolutionized quasar observations. He was the 1992 Bruce Medalist. Asteroid 10430 Martschmidt…

Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) Apollo 8 – Mission Accomplished December 27 1982 – Death of Jack Swigert, American, Command Module Pilot for Apollo 13. He was born in 1931. He was one of the 24 persons who flew to the Moon. He died of respiratory failure, due to cancer, eight days before beginning a…

Mary Sommerville Happy Birthday! Simon Marius December 26 1974 – Salyut 4, the third Soviet space station launched. Similar to Salyut 1, with the addition of three rotatable solar arrays. Designed to remain in orbit for  60 days devoted primarily to civilian objectives. It carried an X-ray instrument, called the Filin telescope. 1780 – Mary…

Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) December 25 2016 – Death of Vera Rubin, Astrophysicist and National Medal of Science winner. She confirmed the discovery of  “dark matter”, which is predicted to make up 90% of the mass of the universe. 2003 – The ill-fated Beagle 2 probe, released from the Mars Express spacecraft on December…

Earthrise Jean-Louis Pons December 24 1979 – 1st Ariane launch. 1968 – 69 hours, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds after launch, Apollo 8 is the first manned spacecraft to go into orbit around the moon. The most influential picture of the 20th century, called Earthrise, is taken on custom Kodak film with a Hasselblad camera.…

Spacecraft Cassini snaps a picture of Rhea in 2005. December 23 1672 – Giovanni Cassini discovers Saturn‘s moon Rhea.

Happy Birthday, Yuri! December 22 1961 – Birthday, Yuri Malenchenko, Russian cosmonaut born in Khrushchev, Kirovohrad Oblast, Ukrainian SSR. Time in space 641 days, 11 hours, 11 minutes. EVA time: 30 hours, 7 minutes. Missions: Soyuz TM-19, Mir EO-16, STS-106, Soyuz TMA-2, Expedition 7, Soyuz TMA-11, Expedition 16, Soyuz TMA-05M, Expedition 32, Expedition 33. On…