1982 – Soviet probe Venera 14 landed on Venus
1979 – Voyager 1 (USA) closest approach to
Jupiter when it flew within 206,700 kilometers (128,400 miles) of the planet’s cloud tops. Volcanic activity was discovered on Io on the 8th.
1979 – Soviet probes Venera 11, Venera 12 and the American solar satellite Helios II all are hit by “off the scale” gamma rays leading to the discovery of soft gamma repeaters. The first ferocious blast of gamma-rays from enigmatic objects called magnetars was observed. Ever since, scientists have been unraveling what happened – and discovering radical new members of the cosmos. A pulsar-strength magnetic field – at the star’s
\ surface – would kill you instantly by rearranging all the atoms and molecules in your body. Anything over about 1 billion gauss – a billion times the strength of Earth’s magnetic field – would kill you. (NASA)
1958 – Explorer 2 is launched by a Jupiter-C rocket but fails to reach orbit.
1616 – Nicolaus Copernicus’s book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium is banned by the Catholic Church 73 years after it was first published.
Birthdays
1935 – Philip Kenyon Chapman, Australian-American astronaut and engineer he was the first Australian-born American astronaut, serving for about five years in NASA Astronaut Group 6 (1967). (d. 5 April 2021) His career thesis in Physics
was “Theoretical Foundations of Gravitational Experiments in Space (1967)” Doctoral advisors Steven Weinberg Rainer Weiss.
1794 – Jacques Babinet was a French physicist, mathematician, and astronomer who is best known for his contributions to optics. (d. 21 October 1872)
1512 – Gerardus Mercator, famed mapmaker.
