BellaOnline Forums Thread Like Summary - 2021: On this day . . .

On this day in 1801 – January 1st – Giuseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres.

Ceres was the first object discovered in what's now known as the asteroid belt. It was at first considered a planet, then an asteroid, and is now classed as a dwarf planet.

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On this day in 1826 – February 8th – Jules Verne was born.

The French author was a major European literary figure, best known in the English-speaking world for his exciting and influential adventure stories, many of which are considered early science fiction. Ray Bradbury said "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne."

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On this day in 1724 – April 22nd – the German philosopher Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia).

His theoretical work in astronomy and cosmology anticipated and inspired later discoveries about our Galaxy and others, including the idea that the Solar System was a part of a system of stars constituting a lens-shaped galaxy, and that there were many other galaxies scattered throughout and making up the whole Universe.

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On this day in 1894 – June 25th – German physicist and engineer Hermann Oberth was born.

Oberth is considered one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics.

Angie, absolutely not. I have no wish to travel into space. And the billionaire space race isn't lighting up my life either. It doesn't sit well with the climate summits.

Though I admit that I can't help being pleased that Jeff Bezos is taking Wally Funk on his Blue Origin flight. She's an extraordinary woman and should have been a NASA astronaut, but it was only military pilots - no girls allowed - in the early days.

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On this day in 1972 – July 23rd – the USA launched Landsat 1.

The near-polar orbiting spacecraft served as a stabilized, Earth-oriented platform for obtaining information on Earth resources of all kinds, meteorology, pollution, etc. Over the lifetime of the satellite it provided around 300,000 images.

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On this day in 2012 – August 6th – the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landed on Mars.

Curiosity continues to carry out the mission of searching for signs of habitable environments, past and present, on the red planet.

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On this day in 2000 – August 9th – the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the second pair of Cluster satellites.

This completed the four-satellite constellation of the Cluster II mission, which is still carrying out a detailed investigation of how the Sun and Earth interact.

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On this day in 1913 – August 31st – English radio astronomer Bernard Lovell was born.

Lovell was a pioneer of radio astronomy and founded the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England in 1945. When the telescope was built there - later named the Lovell Telescope - it was for many years the largest steerable radio telescope in the world.