1997 – MIR collides with Progress resupply ship causing the cabins to depressurize and damage to the station’s solar panels.
1997 – The Galileo spacecraft passes by Jovian moon Callisto at a distance of only 415 km (258 miles)! This is only slightly higher than the altitude by which the space shuttle typically travels around the Earth (approximately 300 km or 186 miles).
1976 – The Viking 1 space probe captured the famous “Face on Mars” image in the Cydonia region of the planet. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this image of an eroded mesa made famous by its similarity to a human face in a Viking 1 Orbiter image with much lower spatial resolution and a different lighting geometry.
1971 – Soyuz 11 Day 20 The crew sets a new world endurance record in space that would hold until Skylab 2 in 1973.
Birthdays
1932 – Paul Joseph Weitz was an American naval officer and aviator, aeronautical engineer, test pilot, and NASA astronaut, who flew into space twice. He was a member of the three-man crew who flew on Skylab 2, the first crewed Skylab mission. He was also commander of the STS-6 mission, the maiden flight of the Space Shuttle (d. October 22, 2017)
1894 – Hermann Julius Oberth was an Austro-Hungarian-born German physicist and rocket pioneer. He was known for his research on rockets in spaceflight, the space mirror, the Moon Car and Ion propulsion for interplanetary spaceflight. (d. 28 December 1989)
