This Day in Astro History: April

April 2

1984 - The first Indian cosmonaut, Rakesh Sharma, a 35 year old Indian Air Force pilot launched along with two other Soviet cosmonauts aboard Soyuz T-11. He spent eight days in space aboard Salyut 7.

1964 - Zond 1 (USSR) launched. Venus probe mission, it never arrived and is now in solar orbit.

1959 - Selection Of The Mercury 7 Astronauts, Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Walter Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton.

1958 - President Eisenhower proposed NASA to Congress. It formally came into existence on July 29.

1889 - Harvard Observatory's 13" refractor arrives on Mt. Wilson, a month later it begins an astronomical legacy at this site which housed the largest telescopes in the world from 1908-48: the 60" for the first decade followed by the 100". This latter mirror is still the largest solid ever cast in plate glass; weighing 4 1/2 tons, it's just 13 inches thick.

1845 - First photo of the Sun taken.

Rakesh Sharma

April 3

2002 - Life in Rocks in Space. NASA scientist Friedemann Freund confirms that sufficient levels of "hydrogen food" are available to a community of Archaea surviving without sunlight or organics deep in the rock of our planet and perhaps other rocks in space.

2002 - Uganda - Eight glowing objects flew across the skies. Local people feared it was an attack from neighboring Congo. The UPDF spokesman, Major Shaban Bantariza of the army confirmed that the objects were meteorites, "rocks falling onto the earth from the outer space.". But the next day the falling rocks prove to be space junk

1966 - USSR - First lunar orbiter, Luna 10. was put into a selenocentric orbit and becomes the Moon's first man-made satellite. Launched March 31, 1966 it fulfilled its mission and returned valuable data on the gamma-emissions from the lunar surface and rocks.

Bacillus infernus was discovered by Dr. David Boone in a deep drilling project in Virginia.
Copyright: Henry Aldrich

April 5

1991 - The launch of (GRO) Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. The purpose of the mission is to obtain gamma-ray measurements over the entire celestial sphere, with significantly improved angular resolution and sensitivity over previous gamma-ray space missions. Compton was safely deorbited and re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on June 4, 2000.

1973 - Pioneer 11 made the first direct observations of Saturn (1979) and studied energetic particles in the outer heliosphere. The Pioneer 11 Mission ended on 30 September 1995, when the last transmission from the spacecraft was received. Its electrical power source exhausted, the spacecraft could no longer operate any of its scientific instruments, nor point its antenna toward Earth. The spacecraft is headed toward the constellation of Aquila (The Eagle), Northwest of the constellation of Sagittarius. Pioneer 11 may pass near one of the stars in the constellation in about 4 million years. (NASA)

April 6

1993 - NASA scientists using the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) find direct evidence that red supergiant stars end their existence in massive explosions known as supernovae. Twelve million light years away, in the galaxy known as M81 the Type II supernova was designated SN 1993J, the tenth supernova of the year. IUE was launched into Earth orbit in January 1978 by a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the British Science and Engineering Research Council. Managed by Goddard Space Flight Center with the ESA in Villafranca, Spain.

1965 - Launch of Early Bird (Intelsat 1), first commercial communication satellite, used by the Canadian Overseas Telecommunications Corporation (Teleglobe Canada in 1975) for transatlantic communications.

Supernova

Credit: Photograph © 1996 Tenmon Guide, by Akira Otawara

Yuji Hyakutake
1951 - 2002

Halley's Comet Returns

April 11

2002 - Yuji Hyakutake, born in an amateur Japanese astronomer who discovered "Comet Hyakutake" in 1996, dies at 51. Hyakutake, a native of Nagasaki Prefecture, won international acclaim after he found the new comet, using a powerful pair of binoculars on Jan 30, 1996, in the town of Hayato in Kagoshima.

1960 - First radio search for extraterrestrial civilizations started by Frank Drake (Project Ozma).

1986 - At 65 million km, Halley's Comet , is closest to Earth for this apparition and its 30th return to our neighbourhood.

1862 - William Wallace Campbell's birthday, 1915 Bruce Medalist and pioneer observer of stellar motions and radial velocities; director of Lick Observatory from 1901 to 1930, he also served as president of the Univ. of Calif. and the Nat`l Academy of Sciences.

April 12

2002 -

Sean O'Keefe, new NASA Administrator outlines his strategic vision for the agency's future and announces the return of the Teacher In Space Program cancelled after the Challenger disaster in 1986, STS-51L. Barbara Morgan, who had trained side-by-side with Christa McAuliffe and the Challenger crew, will continue the mission and become the first Education Mission Specialist in space in 2004.

1981 - Space Shuttle Era Begins - 7:00:03 a.m, EST. Launch of STS-1 Columbia, three seconds late. Postponed from April 10. John Young, Commander and Robert Crippen, pilot orbit the earth 37 times in two days before returning home. Primary mission objectives of the maiden flight were to check out the overall Shuttle system, accomplish a safe ascent into orbit and to return to Earth for a safe landing. Duration: 2 Days, 6 hours, 20 min, 53 seconds. Distance: 1,074,567 miles

1961 - The first man in space.

(Russian astronaut (major) - Yury Alekseyevich Gagarin) orbited the Earth only once aboard Vostok 1. Born near Smolensk. The flight lasted 1 hr 48 min, on an elliptical course having an apogee of 327 km (203 mi) and a perigee of 180 km (112 mi). Gagarin was killed in the crash of a test airplane in 1968.

1849 - de Gasparis' Discovery of Asteroid Hygiea

The new NASA vision for the future is:
    To improve life here,
    To extend life to there,
    To find life beyond
The NASA mission is:
    To understand and protect our home planet
    To explore the Universe and search for life
    To inspire the next generation of explorers
    as only NASA can

STS 1 Mission Patch

April 13

1970 - "Houston, we've got a problem." The words of astronaut Jack Swigert to Mission Control in Houston after Apollo 13's oxygen tank number two in the service module exploded. After consulting with Mission Control, Swigert, commander Jim Lovell, and lunar module pilot Fred Haise, Jr., moved into the lunar module, which remained undamaged. The flight continued to and around the Moon and then back to Earth. The whole world watched as the ground crew and spacecraft crew overcame the obstacles and returned the astronauts to Earth unharmed. Mission duration 5 days, 22 hours, and 54 minutes.

April 14

1629 - Christian Huygens' Birthday, Dutch physicist and astronomer and one of the preeminent scientists of the 17th century. Born in The Hague, The Netherlands. He studied at Leyden and Breda, discovered the ring and fourth satellite of Saturn (1655), and got the patent for the first pendulum clock (1657). In optics he propounded the wave theory of light, and discovered polarization. He lived in Paris, a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences from 1666-1681 but returned to The Hague because of religious persecution. Nasa has honored Huygens by naming a space probe which is on Cassini, currently (1999) on its way to Saturn.

2000 - Astronomers at Northwestern University and University of Illinois detected the first observational evidence for the remnants of hypernovae, explosions a hundred times more energetic than supernovae and the possible source of powerful gamma ray bursts (GRB), making them the most energetic events known in the Universe other than the Big Bang.

2000 - Scientists at the Geological Survey of Western Australia announce their discovery of buried remains of an 80-mile wide impact crater near the town of Woodleigh, near Shark Bay on Australia's west coast. Using gravity measurements to find the multi-ring crater they estimated age of this rock from space makes it chief suspect behind the worst extinction catastrophes in Earth's history. This crater may correlate with one of three events known in the fossil record: the Late Devonian extinction (364 million years), the end of the Permian (247 million years), and the end of the Triassic (214 million years).

1991 - Gamma Ray Observatory (GRO) launched.

Christian Huygens
(1629 - 1695)

April 15

1999 - Launch of Landsat 7 for NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket from NASA's Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

1961 - Yuri Gagarin, first human in space, is awarded the Order of Lenin.

1800 - James Ross discovers North Magnetic Pole.

1793 - Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve born in Altona, Den. [now in Germany] Struve founded the modern study of binary stars. He died Nov. 23, 1864 , St. Petersburg, Russia

Struve, 19th century double star astronomer

Wilbur Wright

April 16

1972 - Apollo 16 Launch. Crew John W. Young, Thomas K. Mattingly II, Charles M. Duke, Jr. First study of lunar highlands area. Mission duration 11 Days, 01 hours, 51 min, seconds

1946 - First American assembled V-2 rocket launched from White Sands Proving Ground.

1867 - Wilbur Wright's Birthday. Wilbur and brother Orville invented powered human flight and on December 17 in 1903 fly the first heavier than air machine. Born at Millville, Indiana. He dies of typhoid in 1912.

V-2 rocket

Dave Williams
A Canadian Superstar

April 17

1998 -

Dafydd (Dave) Rhys Williams (M.D.)

STS-90

1967

Surveyor 3

the Moon

STS-90 Mission Patch

April 18

2001 - India successfully launched a rocket capable of firing satellites deep into space and joins the elite space club, the US, Russia, China, Japan and the European SpaceAgency.

2000 -In 7.5 hours a team of scientists led by Jeffrey McClintock (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) use the Chandra X-ray Observatory to obtain images the spectrum of a stellar black hole in the Constellation Ursa Major.

NASA/CfA/J. McClintock et al.

STS - 100 mission patch

April 19

2001 - 2:41 p.m. EDT, Launch of STS-100 - Installation of CanadaArm 2 to the International Space Station.
Kent V. Rominger (5); Mission Commander, Jeffrey S. Ashby (2), Pilot; Chris A. Hadfield (2), (Canada) Mission Specialist; Scott E. Parazynski (4); Mission Specialist John L. Phillips (1); Mission Specialist Umberto Guidoni (2); Mission Specialist Yuri Valentinovich Lonchakov (1), Mission Specialist
Mission Objective: Mount the 57-foot-long Canadarm2 on the Destiny Laboratory for future station assembly work.

1982 - Salyut 7, Russian Space Station for a crew of five arrives in orbit.

STS-100 launch

April 20

1972 - Apollo 16 lands on the Moon. One of six successful human Moon missions, John W. Young and Thomas K. Mattingly II touched down in the Descartes Highlands. This was the first study of highlands area, various cameras and experiments were deployed and the Lunar Rover Vehicle was used for second time. Lunar surface stay-time, 71 hours. 95.8 kg (213 lbs) of moon rocks were collected.

1961 - Harold Graham achieves the first free flight of Bell Aerosystems "Rocket Belt." Graham flew successfully at 7 to 10-mph for 13 seconds over a distance of 112 feet.

John Young salutes stars and stripes

CME Coronal Mass Explosion

April 21

2002 - A Sun eruption on this date provided an excellent opportunity for a large suite of instruments on the SOHO, TRACE and RHESSI spacecraft to gather data that could be compared to the Lin & Forbes model of CMEs. "TRACE and RHESSI observed the initiation of the eruption and the UVCS instrument on SOHO observed the event above the surface in the region of peak acceleration. Its observations provided direct evidence of the hot gas identified with the current sheet predicted by the Lin & Forbes model. This is the strongest evidence yet that the Lin & Forbes model is an accurate description of how CMEs are produced."

1999 - The UoSat-12 spacecraft is launched, a technology-demonstration platform by Surrey Space Technologies, Ltd. (SSTL), UoSat-12 contains three onboard processors, four RF transponders, two onboard LANs, and a number of instruments, including a multi-spectral image scanner.

April 22

2002 - Lyrids (Lyra): 11pm: Associated Comet 1861 1: Meteors per Hour 15

2001 - Chris A. Hadfield becomes the first Canadian to walk in space. (Endeavour STS-100 mission to ISS, launched April 19)
EVA 1 - Actual Start Time: 6:45 a.m. CDT, Actual End Time: 1:55 p.m. CDT, Total EVA: 7 hours, 10 minutes.

CanadaArm 2

"Hadfield and Parazynski connected cables that will feed the initial electrical power, computer commands and video between the station and the new robot arm, which is also known as Canadarm2. They installed and deployed an ultra high frequency communications antenna that will enable the station to conduct future space walk communications and that will improve future shuttle-station communications. Then, they released launch bolts that held the Canadarm2 secure during its trip to orbit, unfolded the arm and prepared it for control from inside the station.

1891 - Sir Harold Jeffreys' birthday, astrogeophysicist and the first to hypothesize the Earth's liquid core; Jeffreys also made contributions to our understanding of tidal friction, nutation, general planetary structure, and the origin of the solar system.

Chris Hadfield
First Canadian to Walk in Space!

Max Planck
(1858 - 1947)

April 23

1858 - Max Planck's birthday, pioneer quantum physicist. The Planck equation describes the amount of light energy emitted by a "blackbody" as a function of its temperature (on an absolute scale) and the wavelength (or frequency) of emission. Blackbodies are perfect absorbers of light and approximate stars over a wide range of conditions.

Planck's earliest work was on the subject of thermodynamics. He published papers on entropy, on thermoelectricity and on the theory of dilute solutions. In a paper published in 1900, he announced that the energy emitted by a resonator could only take on discrete values or quanta. The energy for a resonator of frequency v is hv where h is a universal constant, now called Planck's constant. He was revered by his colleagues, particularly by Albert Einstein, not only for the importance of his discoveries but for his great personal qualities. He was a gifted pianist. He was married twice, but three of his children died young, leaving him with two sons. He suffered a personal tragedy when one of them was executed for his part in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944. He died at Göttingen on October 3, 1947.

April 26

2000 - Cosmologists reveal first detailed images of early universe. Scientists of the BOOMERANG project, using a micromesh bolometer, release images which bring the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) into sharp focus. "The images reveal hundreds of complex regions that are visible as tiny variations -- typically only 100-millionths of a degree Celsius (0.0001 C) -- in the temperature of the CMB. The complex patterns visible in the images confirm predictions of the patterns that would result from sound waves racing through the early universe, creating the structures that by now have evolved into giant clusters and super-clusters of galaxies." Their research determines that the geometry of space is "very nearly flat."

1920 - Shapley-Curtis debate on the nature and distance of spiral nebulae, aka galaxies at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. Shapley believed that the Milky Way was the entire universe, Curtis was an advocate of the "island universe" theory.

1933 - Arno Penzias' birthday, Nobel Prize winner for his part in the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Boomerang Project at
Mt. Erebus Antartica,
under a CMB sky.

Arno Penzias

April 28

2001 - ISS to STS-100, the first ever robotic-to-robotic transfer in space. A Canadian “handshake" occurred at 4:02 p.m (CDT) as the Canadian-built space station robotic arm, operated by ISS crew Susan J. Helms, transferred it's launch cradle over to Endeavour’s robotic arm, aperated by Chris. A. Hadfield a Canadian Space Agency astronaut.

2001 - First Space Tourist Denis Tito is launches aboard a Soyuz rocket headed for the International Space Station. Despite last minute efforts by NASA to have the flight postponed the Russian Space Agency

1900 - Jan Hendrick Oort's birthday, who quantified the Milky Way's rotation characteristics and proposed a vast, spherical reservoir of comets (the Oort Cloud) surrounding the Sun and stretching nearly half way to the nearest stars.

1906 - Bart Jan Bok's birthday, Dutch-born American astronomer who had a distinguished career studying the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way, and who, with his astronomer/wife Priscilla, authored the classic book on the subject. As director of the Univ. of Arizona's Steward Obs., Bok was also influential in the siting of Kitt Peak Nat`l Obs. in the Tucson area.

1928 - Eugene Merle Shoemaker's birthday. Born in Los Angeles, California he graduated at 19 from California Institute of Technology at Pasedena and a year later earned his Master's Degree and joined the US Geological Survey. Having been turned down by for the Astronaut Program in 1963 he headed up astronaut geological training. When the USGS Center of Astrogeology was founded in Flagstaff in 1965, he was appointed its chief scientist. He became famous to the general public with the co-discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 which impacted into the Jupiter atmosphere in 1994. "His many honors included the Wetherill Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1965, election to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1980, the Gilbert Award of the Geological Society of America in 1983 and the Kuiper Prize of the American Astronomical Society in 1984. Above all, he was truly the "father" of the science of near-earth objects, to the discovery and study of which The Spaceguard Foundation is dedicated" - Brian Marsden. Eugene Shoemaker died in a car crash in Australia. One ounce of his cremains were launched aboard the Lunar Prospector which impacted the Moon on July 31, 1999.

Gene Shoemaker
Planetary Science
Superstar

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