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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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On this day in 1998 – January 6th – NASA's Lunar Prospector was launched.
The mission was designed to investigate the Moon from low polar orbit. This would include mapping the surface composition, locating lunar resources, and measuring magnetic and gravity fields.
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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On this day in 1610 – January 7th – Galileo wrote the first letter in which he described his observations of the Moon through a telescope.
In Galileo's time, the Moon was assumed to be a perfectly smooth sphere. However Galileo saw that the surface was uneven with mountains, plains and valleys.
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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On this day in 1610 – January 7th – Galileo first saw three of Jupiter's moons.The three objects he saw in his telescope are now known as Callisto, Io and Europa, three of the four Galilean moons.
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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On this day in 1587 – January 8th – Johannes Fabricius was born.
Fabricius was a German/Frisian astronomer, eldest son of David Fabricius who was also an astronomer. In their solar observing, they discovered sunspots about the same time as, and independently of, Galileo.
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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On this day in 1942 – January 8th – English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was born.
For thirty years he was the Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge, a prestigious post once held by Isaac Newton. Hawking also wrote books on cosmology for the general public, the best known being A Brief History of Time. He was most closely associated with his work on black holes.
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BellaOnline Editor Modern Day Human
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On this day in 1839 – January 9th – Thomas Henderson published his determination of the distance to Alpha Centauri.Henderson had actually been the first person to calculate the distance to a fixed star by using stellar parallax. However he had delayed publishing his results, and the credit for being first went elsewhere.
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On this day in 1946 – January 10th – the US Army Signal Corps had the first successful echo detection of a radar signal bounced off the Moon.
It was part of the first experiment in radar astronomy, a technique used decades later to map the planet Venus.
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On this day in 1787 – January 11th – William Herschel discovered the Uranian moons Oberon and Titania.It would be almost five decades after Titania and Oberon were discovered that an astronomer other than Herschel would observe them.
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Chimpanzee
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Chimpanzee
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On this day in 1907 – January 12th – Sergei Korolev was born.Korolev was the mastermind of the Soviet space program, and a state secret referred to, if at all, as the Chief Designer.
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