Beyond Earth History Blog

 DART — Double Asteroid Redirection Test Artist’s impression of the aftermath of the DART impact on Dimorphos. The illustration shows the ejection of a cloud of debris after NASA’s DART spacecraft collided with the asteroid Dimorphos. The image was created with the help of the close-up photographs of Dimorphos that the DRACO camera on the DART spacecraft took right before the impact. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission was the first mission designed to evaluate the kinetic impact technique by striking an asteroid with a spacecraft at high relative velocity and observing the resulting change in orbit. The test involved flying the DART spacecraft at high relative velocity into the smaller of two asteroids that are co-orbiting in a binary pair, and using Earth-based observations before and after the impact to study the effects on the orbit. It also carried the...

Montgolfier balloon  The first manned free flight The first human balloon ascension; balloon with Pilatre de Rozier and Marquis d'Arlandes above Paris on November 21, 1783. Engraving by N. de Launay, drawn by Chev. de Lorimier. Credit: Library of Congress On November 21, 1783, the first free flight by humans was made by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier (1754–1785), together with an army officer, the François Laurent, marquis d'Arlandes (1742–1809), aboard a hot air balloon which had been designed and built by the brothers Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (1740–1810) and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier (1745–1799).       The flight began at 1:54 p.m. from the garden of the Château de la Muette close to the Bois de Boulogne park in the western outskirts of Paris, in the presence of the king. Pilâtre de Rozier and marquis d'Arlandes flew about 3,000 feet (900 m) above Paris for a distance of nine kilometers. After 25 minutes, the...

 Edwin Powell Hubble   Edwin Powell Hubble in 1931. Credit: Johan Hagemeyer   Edwin Powell Hubble, one of the leading astronomers of the twentieth century, was born in Marshfield, Missouri, on November 20, 1889. His discovery in the 1920s that countless galaxies exist beyond our own Milky Way galaxy revolutionized our understanding of the universe and our place within it.    Hubble was the fifth of his parents' eight children. He studied mathematics and astronomy at the University of Chicago and earned a bachelor of science degree in 1910. Hubble was one of the first Rhodes Scholars at Oxford University, where he studied jurisprudence (philosophy of law) and obtained a bachelor of arts degree. In 1913, he returned to the United States and taught at a high school in Indiana for a year, before going back to the University of Chicago in 1914 for graduate work in astronomy. He co...

Discovery of X-rays A print of one of the first X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen of the left hand of his wife Anna Bertha Ludwig. It was presented to Professor Ludwig Zehnder of the Physik Institut, University of Freiburg, on 1 January 1896. Credit: Wikimedia Commons The German scientist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen ( 1845– 1923)  discovered X-rays at the Physical Institute of the University of Würzburg on November 8, 1895. He wrote an initial report "Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen. Vorläufige Mitteilung" ("On a new kind of ray: A preliminary communication") and on December 28, 1895, submitted it to Würzburger Physikal.-medic. Gesellschaft journal. To signify an unknown type of radiation, Röntgen named the discovery X-radiation.    There are conflicting accounts of his discovery because Röntgen had his lab notes ...

 1631 transit of Mercury   Gassendi’s diagram showing the motion of Mercury across the face of the Sun from Mercurius in sole visus & Venus invisa (1632). Credit: Todd Timberlake. Observing Transits of Mercury from 1631 to Now   The first recorded transit of Mercury was observed on November 7, 1631, in Paris, by the French theologian, philosopher and astronomer Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655).     After completion in 1627 of the Rudolphine Tables , describing in numbers the position of the heavenly bodies using his new theory of elliptical planetary orbits, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) predicted that both Mercury and Venus will transit over the Sun's disk in 1631 — on November 7 for Mercury and on December 6 for Venus. He wrote an "admonition" to astronomers, that was published in 1630. Kepler died that year, never witnessing his predictions.     Many astronomers in Europe attemp...

 SN 1572. Tycho's Supernova   A star map of the constellation Cassiopeia showing the position of the supernova of 1572, the topmost star, labelled I, from Tycho Brahe's De nova stella . Credit: Tycho Brahe/Wikimedia Commons Supernova SN 1572, also known as Tycho's Supernova or Tycho's Nova, was a supernova of Type Ia in the constellation Cassiopeia, one of eight supernovae visible to the naked eye in historical records. It appeared in early November 1572 and was independently discovered by many individuals. Its discovery marked a milestone in the history of science, challenging the Aristotelian dogma of the immutability of the realm of stars.       SN 1572 was well observed in Europe, as well as in the Far–East, for 16 months before fading from sight. The supernova was not yet noticeable on November 2, and its first observation was done on November 6 by German ...