2001 – American Institute of Physics, Bulletin of Physics News, Number 521. Physicists in two separate laboratories stop a pulse of light.
2000 – A meteor thundered over the Yukon in Canada. The noise and smell sent residents running. It’s remains land on Tagish Lake and are smartly collected by Jim Brook and turned over to Canadian and NASA scientists for analysis. It is a carbonaceous chondrite, a rare type of space rock that contains many forms of carbon and organics, basic building blocks of life. The find is potentially the most important recovery of a rock from space in at least 31 years. Later analysis of 45 chemical elements suggests that the space rock contains material that is unchanged since the birth of the solar system.
Approximately 500 meteorites had been found on Taku Arm in a strewn field 16 kilometres long and three kilometres wide. Thousands more fell on the ice and the surrounding hills and mountains, but none have yet been found on land. Approximately 200 meteorites were recovered totaling five to 10 kilograms in mass, but most of this material remains frozen and a tonne of meteorite-bearing ice is now in storage. A field effort consisting of 234 person field days is now over. This recovery effort is believed unique in the history of meteoritics. – University of Calgary
2000 – NASA ends attempts to contact Mars Polar Lander. It was lost on Dec. 3, 1999 during the landing phase of the mission.
2000 – The glow of x rays seen in all directions in space was now resolved into emissions from discrete sources by the Chandra X-Ray Telescope, ending the notion that the x rays come from distant hot gas. The American Institute of Physics Bulletin.
Birthdays
1971 – Amy J. Barger is an American astronomer and a Henrietta Leavitt Professor of Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is considered a pioneer in combining data from multiple telescopes to monitor multiple wavelengths and in discovering distant galaxies and supermassive black holes, which are outside of the visible spectrum.