A Brief History On February 17, 1600, Italian polymath and philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the Papal States of Rome for the crime of heresy. Digging Deeper Bruno had the nerve to believe in the Heliocentric model of the solar system as taught by Polish astronomer Copernicus, and that the stars in the sky were really distant suns that had their own planets. Further, Bruno opined that unlike the Catholic belief, not only was our Sun not the center of the universe, the universe is infinite and therefore could have no center. As he was led…
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A Brief History On February 15, 1996, the Chinese space program took a tragic turn when a Long March 3B rocket malfunctioned and crashed into a Chinese village, killing between 6 and 100 people on the ground. Digging Deeper The rocket was carrying an Intelsat 708 communications satellite into space, but veered off course shortly after lift off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. While the highly publicized American Space Shuttle disasters come to mind when discussing fatal space incidents, there have been many failures of space launches that have resulted in the expensive loss of equipment and in some…
A Brief History On February 14, 2000, the American spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker orbited asteroid 433 Eros, the first spacecraft from Earth to orbit an asteroid. Digging Deeper NEAR Shoemaker had been designed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and was launched in 1996. Not only did the spacecraft make history with its orbit, a year later it made space history again by being the first spacecraft to touch down on an asteroid, the same 433 Eros. The spacecraft was named after Eugene Shoemaker, an American geologist that studied impact craters on the Earth, but also studied…
A Brief History On February 10, 1862, during the American Civil War, the Union fleet won the battle of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, by sinking the Confederate “Mosquito Fleet.” So, what is a “mosquito fleet?” Digging Deeper Generally speaking, a mosquito fleet is an unofficial nickname for a fleet of small warships or gunboats, in the case of the Confederate mosquito fleet mentioned here, 5 gunboats and a single schooner. Other nations and navies have employed mosquito fleets, ranging from commandeered private yachts used for anti-submarine patrol during the World Wars to converted fishing or utility vessels pressed into military…
A Brief History On February 7, 1984, two astronauts from the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-41-B made space exploration history by taking the first untethered space walk outside of their space ship. Digging Deeper Not being attached by any sort of lifeline had to be a terrifying prospect, but astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart, both on their first space flight, operated outside the Challenger free of any safety line for over 5 hours. In 1972, President Richard Nixon announced the NASA Space Shuttle program, an ambitious program sadly remembered for the Challenger and Columbia disasters, but…
