Space Exploration

January 4, 1958

After nearly 3 months in orbit, the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite, Sputnik 1 falls to Earth.

January 3, 1999

The Mars Polar Lander is launched. The mission ultimately ended in failure during an attempted landing on Mars’ surface. Attempts to re-establish communication with the lander failed after the lander entered Mars’ atmosphere. It has been concluded that the most likely cause of the failure was a software error, causing the lander to crash into the planet. Even though software was the likely culprit, it has not been proven that Microsoft had anything to do with it 🙂

January 2, 2004

The NASA spacecraft Stardust successfully flies past Comet Wild 2, collecting samples that are returned to Earth.

January 2, 1959

Luna 1, the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon and to orbit the Sun, is launched by the U.S.S.R.

The view of Earth rising over the lunar surface from Apollo 8

December 23, 1968

Astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, and William Anders become the first men to orbit the Moon. Flying in Apollo 8, the men perform 10 total lunar orbits and test many of the procedures that will be used in future lunar missions. Additionally, the men were the first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit, the first to see Earth as a whole planet, and the first to directly see the far side of the Moon. On Christmas Eve, the crew made a television broadcast from which they read the first 10 verses from the Book of Genesis.  It was the most watched television program ever at the time.

December 13, 1962

NASA launches the active repeater communication satellite Relay I from Cape Canaveral. One of the earliest communication satellites to be launched, Relay I’s mission was primarily experimental, but it nonetheless was used for some notable events. On November 22, 1963 Relay I was the first satellite to broadcast television from the United States to Japan, which happened to be the announcement of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was then used in August of 1964 to broadcast the 1964 Summer Olympics from Japan to Europe and the United States, relaying the signal with another satellite, Syncom 3. It was the first time two satellites were used in tandem for a television broadcast. Relay I was used until February 10, 1965, when a problem with its power system caused the satellite to become non-functional.

December 4, 1993

The Space Shuttle Endeavour captures the Hubble Space Telescope to begin the first servicing mission of the flawed satellite. Over the next 5 days a variety of repairs and upgrades are completed, most notably the installation of the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR) and the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) modules that together were able to compensate for the flaw in the Hubble’s main mirror. Once these corrections were made, the Hubble Space Telescope was, after 3 years, finally able to fulfill its promise of delivering detailed imagery that was not possible with Earth-based telescopes.