Beyond Earth History Blog

    Voyager 2 Uranus Encounter Artist’s impression of Voyager passing Uranus, created for NASA in 1981. Credit: NASA/JPL/Don Davis Voyager 2 flew by Uranus on January 24, 1986. At the closest approach, at 17:58:51 UT, the spacecraft came within 81,500 km of the planet's cloudtops. The probe discovered new rings, eleven previously unknown moons, and a magnetic field tilted at 55° off-axis and off-center. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to explore Uranus. After the encounter the probe proceeded on its journey to Neptune.    The spacecraft's observations at the distance of Uranus and Neptune were hampered by the need to take images in low light conditions. The intensity of sunlight on Uranus is about 360 times lower, and on Neptune about 900 times lower, than on Earth. This forced the spacecraft to take images of passing bodies using long exposure times, which risked blurring the images due to the spacecraft's own motion and vibrations. At the same ...

    Buzz Aldrin    Buzz Aldrin. This is the official NASA portrait of astronaut Edwin E. (Buzz) Aldrin from 1964 Buzz Aldrin, born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr., American astronaut, engineer and fighter pilot was born on January 20, 1930, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Prior to joining NASA, Aldrin flew 66 combat missions in F-86s while on duty in Korea. At Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, he served as an aerial gunnery instructor. Following his assignment as aide to the dean of faculty at the Air Force Academy, Aldrin flew F-100s as a flight commander at Bitburg, Germany.     Aldrin was one of the third group of astronauts named by NASA in October 1963 and has logged 289 hours and 53 minutes in space, of which, 7 hours and 52 minutes were spent in Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA). On November 11, 1966, he launched into space aboard the Gemini XII spacecraft on a 4-day flight, which brought the Gemini program to a successful close. During that mission, Ald...

  Stardust return to Earth Stardust capsule on the ground. Credit: NASA On January 15, 2006, the Sample Return Capsule from the Stardust spacecraft returned to Earth with more than 10,000 particles larger than 1 micrometer, collected from the coma of comet Wild 2 (81P/Wild) and from interstellar dust. Launched on February 7, 1999, Stardust flew by the short-period comet on January 2, 2004. The primary goal of the flyby was to collect samples of the coma and return them to Earth.    The capsule separated from the main craft (with a stabilizing spin of 1.5 rpm) on January 15, 2006, at 5:57 UT and entered the atmosphere four hours later at 9:57 UT. An aeroshell slowed the capsule down initially for about ten minutes, the drogue parachute was deployed at 10:00 UT and the main parachute 5 minutes later at an altitude of roughly 3 km. The capsule landed at 10:10 UT within a 30 x 84 km landing ellipse at the U.S. Air Force Test and Training Range in the Utah desert. Hi...

    Sergei Korolev  Sergei Korolev Sergei Pavlovich Korolev (Russian: Сергей Павлович Королёв), the Chief Designer of the Soviet space program in the Experimental Design Bureau  No.1 (OKB-1), was born on January 12, 1907 (New Style), in Zhytomyr, the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine). He led the development of the world's first ballistic missile R-7, the R-7 derived family of launch vehicles, science, military and communications satellites, interplanetary probes and manned spacecraft. His identity was not made public until after his death in 1966.     Korolev was trained in aeronautical engineering at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute and then at the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School, graduating in 1929. In 1931 he joined the Central Aero and Hydrodynamics Institute (TsAGI). In July 1932, Korolev was appointed chief of Jet Propulsion Research Group, GIRD, one of the earliest state-sponsored centers for rocket development in the USSR. In 1933, ...

Project Diana and the birth of radar astronomy Project Diana radar antenna at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, USA. Credit: InfoAge Science History Learning Center and Museum On January 10, 1946, a team of military and civilian personnel at Camp Evans, Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, USA, reflected the first radar signals off the Moon using a specially modified SCR-270/1 radar. The signals took 2.5 seconds to travel to the Moon and back to the Earth. This achievement, Project Diana, marked the beginning of radar astronomy and space communications. The effort resolved doubts about whether electromagnetic waves suitable for long-range communication and radar could penetrate the Earth’s ionosphere. It was the first documented experiment in radar astronomy and in actively probing another celestial body, and was the dawn of the space age.   ...

  Surveyor VII – The Last Surveyor Engineering model, S-10, of the Surveyor lunar lander at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. It was reconfigured to represent a flight model of Surveyor III or later, since it was the first to have a scoop and claw surface sampler. Credit: Mark Avino. Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Surveyor VII, the last of the series of Surveyor lunar probes, was launched on January 7, 1968. It successfully landed on the Moon near the outer rim of the crater Tycho on January 10, 1968. The spacecraft had returned a total of about 21,000 pictures of itself and its surroundings and studied the chemical composition of the lunar surface. The last communication with the lander was on February 21, 1968.    Surveyor VII was the fifth and final spacecraft of the Surveyor series to achieve a lunar soft landing. The primary objectives of the Surveyor program, a series of seven robotic lunar softlanding flights, were to support the co...