2009 – STS-125 Space Shuttle Atlantis mission to the Hubble Space Telescope carried two new instruments, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and the Wide Field Camera 3. Launch Crew: Scott Altman, Gregory C. Johnson, Michael T. Good, Megan McArthur, John M. Grunsfeld, Mike Massimino, Andrew J. Feustel
1936 – Goddard begins tests of his L Series of liquid fuel rockets at Roswell, New Mexico. These tests, involving 30 total, including 17 successful flights, focused on larger rockets with nitrogen pressurization. The L-15 rockets, for example, ranged from 11 to 13.5 feet in length and weighed up to 360 pounds when fully fueled.
1916 – Karl Schwarzschild dies at Potsdam. Using Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to describe the way space time bends around matter, Schwarzschild described that when a star contracts, there comes a point at which its gravity is so strong that not even light can escape, a black hole. This point is now known as the Schwarzschild radius and is equal to an object’s mass multiplied by twice the constant of gravity and divided by the speed of light squared.
Birthdays
1918 – Richard Feynman‘s Birthday – In 1965, he, along with Julian Schwinger and Shinichiro Tomonaga, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for work in quantum electrodynamics, famous for his unusual life style and for his popular books and lectures on mathematics and physics. Feynman also worked on the Space Shuttle Challenger accident investigation. He shocked the world by demonstrating the failure of the O-rings. Feynman died February 15, 1988 at the age of 69.
