2013 – February 15 at 19:25 Universal Time the asteroid 2012DA14 will pass at a distance of 0.000228 AU (34,100
km; 21,200 mi) from the center-point of Earth. Discoverer:
La Sagra Sky Survey
2013 – An incoming rock, ~20 meters, travelling at 57,000 km/hr explodes over Chelyabinsk, Russia releasing energy 20 to 30 times the Hiroshima atomic bomb The shockwave injures 1500 from flying window glass and destroys property valuing more than $11 million dollars. More info on Near Earth objects from NASA Near Earth Object Program
2010 – Cupola for ISS is installed!
2003 – Last launch of Ariane4.
2005 – The Saturnian spacecraft Cassini successfully completed its third flyby of Saturn’s moon Titan at an altitude of 1577 km (980 miles) above the surface.
2003 – Los Alamos Makes Map of first ice on Mars.
1999 – IKONOS 2 Athena 2 Launch
1996 – At the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in China, a Long March 3B rocket, carrying an Intelsat 708, veers off course and crashes into a rural village after liftoff, killing somewhere between six and 100 people.
1946 – ENIAC, the first electronic general-purpose computer, is formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Birthdays
1935 – Roger B. Chaffee, Birthday. He was an American Astronaut who died on January 27, 1967 along with
Gus Grissom and Edward White during training in Apollo 1.
1851 – Spiru Haret, Romanian mathematician, astronomer, and politician, He made a fundamental contribution to the n-body problem in celestial mechanics. (d. 17 December1912)
1564 – Galileo Galilei Born at Pisa he was the first to report telescopic observations of the mountains on the moon, the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, and the rings of Saturn.
1964 – Leland D. Melvin, American engineer and astronaut who flew on STS-122