2002 – RHESSI finally reaches space aboard a Pegaus rocket. The Principal Investigator was Dr. Robert P. Lin (24 January 1942 – 17 November 2012) University of California, Berkeley. The RHESSI was decommissioned 16 August, 2018
“The approach of the HESSI mission (Small Explorer) is to combine, for the first time, high-resolution imaging in hard X-rays and gamma rays with high-resolution spectroscopy, so that a detailed energy spectrum can be obtained at each point of the image. This new approach will enable researchers to find out where these particles are accelerated and to what energies. Such information will advance understanding of the fundamental high-energy processes at the core of the solar flare problem.”
1971 – Apollo 14 Alan B. Shepard and Edgar D. Mitchell made a lunar landing in the Moon’s Fra Mauro formation. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, returned to space, and become the 5th American to walk on the Moon.
1974 – Mariner 10 Venus Flyby. Mariner10 shows that Venus’ clouds whip around the planet in just four Earth days, though Venus itself takes 243 Earth days to make just one rotation on its axis.
1963 – Maarten Schmidt discovers enormous red shifts in quasars. Schmidt termed 3C 273 a “quasi-stellar” object or quasar; thousands have since been identified. They are extremely luminous, distant, and powerful active galactic nuclei (AGN) powered by supermassive black holes, emitting intense radiation as matter falls into them
Birthdays
1947 – 
Mary L. Cleave, American engineer and astronaut who flew on STS-61-B and STS-30. She also served from 2005 to 2007 as NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. (d. 27 November 2023)