1999 – Astronomers George H. Jacoby and Taft E. Armandroff of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories and James E. Davies of The Johns Hopkins University announced their discovery of a new galaxy, Andromeda VI in The Local Group. The census of the Local Group is now as high as 43 galaxies.
1999 – Yale Astronomers Study Superflares on Stars Just Like Our Sun.
1998 – Launch of NASA’s Lunar Prospector spacecraft, designed and built at Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space in Sunnyvale, CA. This low-cost orbiting mission was the first of NASA’s Discovery class of “faster, better, cheaper” space exploration missions. The $63 million mission, managed by NASA Ames Research Center, returned important science data answering long-standing questions about the Moon. Its primary mission lasted one year. The final task will be to impact a crater rim on July 31, 1999 in order that large telescopes can collect images that may prove water does exist at the lunar poles.
Birthdays
1933 – Oleg Grigoryevich Makarov, Russian astronaut (d. 2003)
1948 – Guy Gardner, American colonel and astronaut
1957 – Michael Foale, English-American astrophysicist and astronaut
1915 – Liisi Oterma, a Finnish astronomer, the first woman to get a Ph.D. degree in astronomy in Finland who discovered or co-discovered periodic comets 38P/Stephan-Oterma and 39P/Oterma, and quite a number of asteroids. The asteroid 1529 Oterma was named in her honour. (d. 2001)