This Day In Astro History

2004 – NASA’s Spirit Rover Lands on Mars at 8:35PM PST. Spirit was active from 2004 to 2010. It operated for over six years, which was more than 25 times its original planned mission length. Spirit traveled 4.8 miles across the Martian plains and found evidence that Mars was once much wetter than it is today.

2000 – Galileo spacecraft flyby of Jupiter‘s moon Europa. The spacecraft traveled past Europa at an altitude of 351 kilometers.

2019 – Chang’e 4 makes the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon, deploying the Yutu-2 lunar rover.

1999 – Launch Of Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 at 3:21 pm EST atop a Delta II rocket. The lander was to arrive at Mars December 3, 1999 and be the first spacecraft ever to set down near Mars‘ southern polar cap. Equipped with a six-foot robotic arm the lander will dig beneath the surface of the planet. Deep Space 2 contains two microprobes which will crash into the planet’s surface and conduct soil and water experiments. Also aboard the spacecraft was the Mars Microphone, a project sponsored by The Planetary Society to send the first sounds from another planet to eager listeners on Earth.

1496 – Leonardo da Vinci unsuccessfully tests a flying machine.