One major importance of going to space is the view we get of ourselves back here on Earth.

JANUARY

visualization of 2001AA

Images of Io captured on the dawn of the new millennium, January 1, 2001 10:00 UTC (spacecraft time), two days after Cassini's closest approach to Jupiter.) source)

January 1 - Happy Next Orbit!

2001 - (Near Earth Asteroid Tracking mission) discovers a 1.5 km sized Mars crossing object 2001AA and dubs it the Millennium Asteroid.

1925 - No longer an Island Universe At a joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society; and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. Edwin Hubble's paper announcing he had found Cephids in "spiral nebulas" initiated the decline in the belief that our Milky Way galaxy was the entire universe. Hubble's discovery would lead to the knowledge that we live in one of many galaxies. 1801 - Guiseppe Piazzi discovered the object between Mars and Jupiter that he called Ceres Ferdinande a (the roman goddess of agriculture). Piazzi's discovery eventually became known under either the name Ceres or the symbol(1), where the numeral, originally placed inside a complete circle indicated that this was the first object found in that region of the solar system. By 1923, when (1000) was announced, the set of objects, while still mainly members of that Cisjovian Belt (also known simply as the "Asteroid Belt", or "Main Belt" of "minor planets"), also included objects that approached within 0.1 AU of the earth or extended out to the orbit of Saturn. Ceresis the largest of the belt objects. At an estimated 918 miles in diameter it accounts for one third the mass of all belt asteroids combined. Its is 2.767 AU (AU=Earth-Sun distance) and it orbits the Sun every 4.61 years.

January 2

1959 - The USSR's Luna1, the first Moon probe, is launched and becomes the first extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Europa's icerafts

Mars Polar Lander, Artist's Conception
Credit NASA

January 3

2000 - Galileo spacecraft flyby of Jupiter's moon Europa .The spacecraft traveled past Europa at an altitude of 351 kilometers. 1999 - Launch Of Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 at 3:21 pm EST atop a Delta II rocket. The lander was to 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

January 4

1610 - January 4 - 15 Possibly the most important days in the history of astronomy. Galileo Galilei, Italy, points his telescope to the sky and observes craters and mountains on the Moon, moving spots on the Sun, four moons revolving around Jupiter , the phases of Venus, and the stars of the Milky Way.

Galileo's wooden tube covered with paper, equipped with an objective bi-convex lens and a plano-convex eyepiece. It magnifies 14 times.

January 5

1969 - Venera 5 (USSR) launched. The probe arrived at Venus on May 16, 1969. Then, before burning up in the atmosphere, for 53 minutes the capsule was suspended from a parachute while data from the Venusian atmosphere was returned. The spacecraft also carried a medallion bearing the coat of arms of the U.S.S.R. and a bas-relief of V.I. Lenin to the night side of Venus.

January 6

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.

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 in The Local Group. The census of the Local Group is now as high as 43 galaxies. [ http://www.noao.edu/outreach/press/9901image.html]

1999 Yale Astronomers Study Superflares on Stars Just Like Our Sun.

Lunar Prospector

January 7

SWAS

1610 - Galileo Galilei discovered three of the four major moons of the planet Jupiter. The final moon was found on January 10, 1610.

1985 - Sakigake Launch. First Japanese deep space probe. (Japan Comet Halley Mission, on March 11, 1986, Sakigake made its closest approach to Halley's Comet).

1997 - Mona Kessel finds proof of the Earth's bow shock position by studying the Earth's magnetosphere.

1999 - SWAS (Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite) detects water in star forming gas clouds!

January 8

1942 - Stephen Hawking's Birthday, British theoretical astrophysicist.

STS 32 Mission Patch

January 9

1990 - STS-32 Launch Mission duration: 10 days, 21 hours, zero minutes, 36seconds. Landed revolution 172. Longest Space Shuttle flight to date.

1839 - South African Thomas Henderson, using geometrical parallax, first measures the distance to a star ( Alpha Centauri) other than the Sun.

January 10

1936 - Robert W. Wilson's birthday, co-discoverer with Arno Penzias of the cosmic microwave (3 degree) background and 1978 Physics Nobel Laureate winners for their 1965 detection of long-wavelength, low-temperature radio emissions coming from the entire universe. Their measurements of the wavelength of the background radiation corresponded with the theorists' predictions. This result supports the big bang theory, which describes an explosion that gave rise to all the matter and radiation in the universe.

1946 - The US Army's Signal Corps successfully bounces the first radar waves off the Moon.

1969 - Venera 6 (USSR) launched. It arrived at Venus on May 17, 1969. This atmospheric probe returned data down to within 11km of the surface before being crushed by the pressure on Venus.

Oberon

January 11

1787 - William Herschel discovers Oberon and Titania , Uranus's largest satellites.

2001 - Planet Hunting Team wins National Academy of Sciences prestigious Draper Award Led by R. Paul Butler and Geoffrey Marcy a multi-year exploration of 1,100 star systems within 300 light years of Earth finds only planet thus far found to transit a host star, two sub-Saturn mass planets, and a multiple-planet system. What is the difference in the astrogeology among star types?

Titania

Nozomi to Mars (ISAS)

January 12

1999 - Japan's probe to Mars delayed. TOKYO (AP) -- Japan's first spacecraft to Mars will reach its destination in late 2003, four years later than initially planned because of a fuel shortage. The half-ton unmanned Nozomi, which means "hope," took off July 4 from southern Japan and was scheduled to reach the orbit around Mars in October this year. Its arrival will be delayed because the spacecraft spent more fuel than expected to correct its course on Dec.21, The spacecraft will require less fuel to go into orbit around Mars if it waits until December 2003, when the planet begins a slower orbit around the sun that lasts through January 2004, Numata said.

1820 - British Royal Astronomical Society Founded

January 13

2000 - A new study by David Rabinowitz of Yale University with colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab estimated the potential Earth-crossing asteroids, greater than one kilometer diameter, has been reduced from 2,000 to about 700. If confirmed this knowledge would bring the risk factor down to one in two thousand.

2000 - Lone Black Holes discovered adrift in the Galaxy.

Potential Incoming

January 14

2002 - ISS Expedition Four - Commander Yury Onufrienko and Flight Engineer Carl Walz floated outside the International Space Station on the first spacewalk of their expedition and finished installing a second Russian cargo boom, part of which had been delivered to the station two and a half years ago. With coordination help from inside the station by Flight Engineer Dan Bursch, the two space walkers also installed an amateur radio antenna on the Zvezda Service Module.

January 15

2001 - Stardust spacecraft gets a gravity assist as flew by the Earth to change the spacecraft's orbit relative to the Sun. Stardust is scheduled to intercept the comet Wild 2 in 2004.

2000 - Astronomers Reveal Coolest Solar Neighbour ever imaged. Using infrared technology Adam Burgasser and Dr. Davy Kirkpatrick at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif., announced their identification of the coolest body ever imaged outside of the solar system, a brown dwarf that lies only 19 light years from Earth. Known as Gliese 570D, it shows methane in its spectrum which makes it's type closer to a planet than a star. Gliense570D is roughly the same size as Jupiter, but its mass is believed to be 50 times greater than Jupiter. "The dividing line between planets and stars was once obvious," said Burgasser, "but we are now finding objects that really blur that distinction."

1976 - Helios2 was launched into a solar orbit. It was the first instrument capable of exploring linear time profiles of gamma-raybursts. The mission ended in 1981.

January 16

History for this day is unavailable. Back to Calendar

January 17

History for this day is unavailable. Back to Calendar

January 18

2001 - American Institute of Physics, Bulletin of Physics News, Number 521. Physicists in two separate laboratories stop a pulse of light.

2000 - NASA ends attempts to contact Mars Polar Lander. It was lost on Dec. 3, 1999 during the landing phase of the mission.

2000 - The glow of x rays seen in all directions in space was now resolved into emissions from discrete sources by the Chandra X-Ray Telescope, ending the notion that the x rays come from distant hot gas. The American Institute of Physics Bulletin.

Mars Lander, Missing in Action

January 19

1747 - Johann Bode's birthday, publicizer of the Titus-Bodelaw, a nearly geometric progression of the distances of the planetsfrom the Sun.

1851 - Jacobus Kapteyn's Birthday, Bruce Medalist 1913, who studied the distribution and motion of half a million stars and created the first modern model of the size and structure of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Buzz Aldrin (1930- )
Buzz Lightyear?

January 20

1999 - New Scientist reports Cataclysmic Explosions May Have Held Up Alien Visitors GAMMA-RAY bursts -- incredibly powerful explosions that may be caused by collisions between collapsed stars -- could solve one of the oldest riddles about extraterrestrial civilizations: why haven't they reached Earth already? After studying the effects of gamma-raybursts on life, an astrophysicist has concluded that aliens may have just started to explore their galaxies.

1930 - Buzz Aldrin's Birthday. His first space flight was in November1966 as copilot of the earth orbital rendezvous mission Gemini12 when he achieved a record 5.5 hour space walk. In July 1969, Colonel Aldrin, as part of the Apollo11 lunar mission, became the second man to set foot on the moon. His companions on the mission were Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong.

1573 - Simon Mayr's birthday, who observed the moons of Jupiter at nearly the same time as Galileo and gave them the Greek names in use today.

January 21

1792 - John Couch Adams' birthday, he predicted the existence of Neptune.

1908 - Bengt Stromgren's birthday, developer of the theory of diffuse nebulae (H II regions) such as the Orion and Trifid nebulas.

Neptune

Roberta Bondar
A Canadian Superstar

January 22

1992- First Canadian Woman in Space. Roberta Bondar flies aboard STS-42. She was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

January 23

1999 - Astronomers racing the clock managed to take the first-ever optical images of one of the most powerful explosions in the Universe -- GRB 990123, a gamma ray burst. The typical gamma ray burst is one million times brighter than a typical supernova. The Sky & Telescope News Bulletin (1/29/99) said "The catch turned out to be so bright and powerful that it may be hard to explain by any theory yet devised."

January 24

1986 - Voyager 2 flyby of Uranus. Voyager 2 obtained clear images of each of the five large moons of Uranus Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon (known before encounter, and discovers ten new moons. Methane, which absorbs red light, was discovered in the planet's upper atmosphere explaining Uranus' blue-green colour.

1990 - Hiten Launch (Japan Moon Mission)

1978 - Cosmos 954 reentered the earth's atmosphere and was located near Yellowknife, Northwestern Territories

1882 - American solar astronomer Harold Babcock's birthday. He proposed that the sunspot cycle was a result of the Sun's differential rotation and magnetic field (1961).

Joseph Louis Lagrange

Jim Brook with frozen remains
of Canada's great meteor find.

Smoketrail from Tagish Lake meteorite.
photo by EwaldLemke.

January 25

1736 - Joseph Louis Lagrange's birthday, famed French mathematician who made important contributions to the field of celestial mechanics.

1994 - Clementine is launched at 16:34 UTC (12:34 PM EDT) from Vandenberg AFB aboard a Titan IIG rocket. A joint project between the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization and NASA. Lunar insertion was achieved on February 21. On May 7 at14:39 UTC a thruster fired abnormally and used up its fuel. This made the flyby of near-earth asteroid, Geographos, impossible, but the mission to the Moon included environmental testing of sensors and spacecraft components and multiwavelength imaging. Clementine's data set covers nearly 100% of the Moon in 11 spectral bands. This dataset will be invaluable for mapping the geology of the Moon and planning future exploration and utilization of lunar resources. . Lunar mapping took place over approximately two months. Interpreted data from the surface of the Moon suggested the presence of water-ice in permanently shadowed craters at the South Pole.

2000 - A meteor thundered over the Yukon in Canada. The noise and smell sent residents running. It's remains land on Tagish Lake and are smartly collected by Jim Brook and turned over to Canadian and NASA scientists for analysis. It is a carbonaceous chondrite, a rare type of space rock that contains many forms of carbon and organics, basic building blocks of life. The find is potentially the most important recovery of a rock from space in at least 31 years. Later analysis of 45 chemical elements suggests that the space rock contains material that is unchanged since the birth of the solar system.

"Approximately 500 meteorites had been found on Taku Arm in a strewn field 16 kilometres long and three kilometres wide. Thousands more fell on the ice and the surrounding hills and mountains, but none have yet been found on land. Approximately 200 meteorites were recovered totaling five to 10 kilograms in mass, but most of this material remains frozen and a tonne of meteorite-bearing ice is now in storage. A field effort consisting of 234 person field days is now over. This recovery effort is believed unique in the history of meteoritics." (University of Calgary)

View from Clementine

January 26

1978- The International Ultraviolet Explorer satellite (IUE) launched into geosynchronous orbit. A joint project of NASA, ESA and PPARC, it's years of operations returned 104470 high- and low-resolution images of 9600 astronomical sources from all classes of celestial objects in the 1150-3350 Å UV band. The space telescope was turned off September 30, 1996.

IUE

January 27

Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee
We will never forget our Space Heros

1967 - Apollo 1 - VirgiI (Gus) Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee die in launch pad fire. Tragedy struck on the launch pad during a preflight test for Apollo 204 (AS-204), which was scheduled to be the first Apollo manned mission, and would have been launched on February 21, 1967. Astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee lost their lives when afire swept through the Command Module (CM).

Apollo 1 Mission Patch

January 28

1999 - The director and staff at Subaru Telescope presented First Light results for their new 8.3-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

1986 - STS 51 L, Space Shuttle Challenger. Disaster. Astronauts killed: Francis R. Scobee, Micheal Smith, Judith Resnick, Ellison S. Onizuka, Gregory B. Jarvis, Ronald E. McNair, and teacher-in-space Christa McAuliffe. Read their bios here. STS-51L ended 1 minute13 seconds after launch. Investigation revealed a booster 0-ring was at fault. " An Accident Rooted in History" was the title of a Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident Report, June, 6, 1986 which outlined the path that led to the tragedy. The Report is available from the NASA History Web here.

Challenger's Last Crew - superstar heros

January 29

1999 - Jan 29 - Feb 3 Pritzker Symposium on the Status of Inflationary Cosmology at the University of Chicago

January 30

1996 - Comet Hyakutake Discovered Earth Closest Approach: March 25, 1996 07:00 UT (0.10 AU) Sun Closest Approach: May 1, 1996 09:31 UT (0.23 AU) 1 AU = 93 Million Miles = 150 Million Kilometers

"I don't care about the naming of the comet. If many people could enjoy that comet, that is the happiest thing for me." - Yuji Hyakutake

Boeing's
JCSat6

X-rays
from Sirus B

January 31

1999 - JCSat6 Atlas IIAS Launch, to meet increased demand for Internet access.

1993 - Egret (Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope) onboard CGRO (Compton Gamma Ray Observatory) detects the brightest burst of gamma rays ever recorded - the Super Bowl Burst.

1971 - Launch of Apollo14, the third Moonlanding mission.

1966 - Luna 9 Launch (Soviet Moon Lander). It performed the first soft landingon another planetary body.

1961 - Mercury-Redstone 2 - A significant step forward in human space adaptation. Space monkey Ham is launched into Earth orbit. The task was to stay focused as Ham pushed levers in response to onboard indicator lights. The space monkey lost focus only twice and electrical shock brought him back to the task. At landing he was rewarded with an apple and half an orange.

1958 - Explorer I, U.S. first artificial satellite was launched at 10:48 P.M. from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It transmitted data on micrometeorites and cosmic radiation for 105 days. This science mission resulted in the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts.

1862 - Alvan Graham Clark, Jr. discovers the faint companion of Sirius,dubbed Sirius B or the Pup, during testing of an 18-inch refractor being built for the Dearborn Obs. by his father, brother, and himself. Friedrich Bessel had proposed the existence of an unseen companion in 1844.

1948 - First research photos taken using the Hale 5-meter (200-inch) telescope at Mt. Palomar.

Apollo 14 Mission Patch

Ham, the space monkey
super star

Today's Space News

This page was created by me. Last updated 16 Nov 2003 .