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1795
France adopted the metre as the basic unit of length.
1862
H P Tuttle discovered asteroid #73 Klytia.
1880
V Knorre discovered asteroid #215 Oenone.
1927
The first long distance public television transmission was made, using telephone lines, from Washington, DC to New York City; the image transmitted was of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover.
1939
Born, Donald L Holmquest, Dallas Texas, astronaut
1953
J A Brouwer discovered asteroid #1660 Wood; and K Reinmuth discovered asteroids #2214 Carol, #2278, #2652 Yabuuti and #2806.
1953
The first west-to-east nonstop transatlantic jet flight was made.
1959
RADAR was first bounced off the Sun, from Stanford, California.
1968
P Wild discovered asteroids #1773 Rumpelstilz, #1830 Pogson, #1831 Nicholson and #2138 Swissair.
1968 10:09:32 GMT
USSR launched the Luna 14 orbiter to the Moon.
Luna 14 was launched 7 April 1968. The spacecraft entered a 160 x 870 km Lunar orbit with an inclination of 42 degrees at 19:25 UT on 10 April 1968. The spacecraft is believed to have been similar to Luna 12, and the instrumentation was similar to that carried by Luna 10. It provided data for studies of the interaction of the Earth and Lunar masses, the Lunar gravitational field, the propagation and stability of radio communications to the spacecraft at different orbital positions, Solar charged particles and cosmic rays, and the motion of the Moon. This flight was the final flight of the second generation of the Luna series.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=1968-027A
1969
The Internet's symbolic birth occurred with the publication of RFC 1.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc0001.txt?number=1
1970
J A Bruwer discovered asteroid #1794 Finsen.
1983
The first spacewalk of NASA's Shuttle program took place when astronauts Peterson and Musgrave spent about four hours, 17 minutes working outside the Challenger orbiter during the STS 6 mission.
Challenger's first launch was originally set for 20 January 1983, but was postponed due to a hydrogen leak into the number one main engine aft compartment discovered during a 20 second Flight Readiness Firing (FRF) on 18 December 1982. Cracks in the number one main engine were confirmed to be the cause of the leak during the second FRF performed 25 January 1983. All three main engines were removed while the Shuttle was on the pad and the fuel line cracks were repaired. Main engines two and three were reinstalled following extensive failure analysis and testing, while the number one main engine was replaced. An additional delay was caused by contamination to the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-1 (TDRS-1) during a severe storm. The launch of STS 6 on 4 April 1983 then proceeded as scheduled.
The primary payload for STS 6 was the first Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS-1). A malfunction of the Inertial Upper Stage booster resulted in placement of the spacecraft into an improper but stable orbit. Additional propellant aboard the satellite was used over the next several months to gradually place TDRS-1 into its properly circularized orbit.
The first space walk of the Shuttle program was performed on 7 April 1983 by Peterson and Musgrave, lasting about four hours, 17 minutes.
Other payloads on STS 6 were: Continuous Flow Electrophoresis System (CFES), Monodisperse Latex Reactor (MLR), Radiation Monitoring Experiment (RME), Night/Day Optical Survey of Lightning (NOSL), and three Get Away Special (GAS) canisters. This mission used the first lightweight external tank and lightweight solid rocket booster casings.
STS 6 ended on 9 April 1983 when Challenger landed on Runway 22, Edwards Air Force Base, California. Rollout distance: 7,244 feet. Rollout time: 49 seconds. Mission duration: five days, zero hours, 23 minutes, 42 seconds. Landed revolution 81. The orbiter was returned to Kennedy Space Center 16 April 1983.
The flight crew for STS 6 was: Paul J. Weitz, Commander; Karol J. Bobko, Pilot; Donald H. Peterson, Mission Specialist; F. Story Musgrave, Mission Specialist.
http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/chron/sts-6.htm
1991
NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory was deployed into Earth orbit from STS 37.
The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory was the second of NASA's Great Observatories. Compton, at 17 tons, was the heaviest astrophysical payload ever flown at the time of its launch on 5 April 1991 aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, and deployed into orbit on 7 April. Compton was safely deorbited and re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on 4 June 2000.
Compton had four instruments that covered an unprecedented six decades of the electromagnetic spectrum, from 30 keV to 30 GeV. In order of increasing spectral energy coverage, these instruments were the Burst And Transient Source Experiment (BATSE), the Oriented Scintillation Spectrometer Experiment (OSSE), the Imaging Compton Telescope (COMPTEL), and the Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET). For each of the instruments, an improvement in sensitivity of better than a factor of ten was realized over previous missions.
The Observatory was named in honor of Dr. Arthur Holly Compton, who won the Nobel prize in physics for work on scattering of high energy photons by electrons - a process central to the gamma ray detection techniques of all four instruments.
NASA photo
http://cossc.gsfc.nasa.gov/
1997
Died (natural causes), Georgi Stepanovich Shonin (at Rovenki, Lugansk, Ukraine), cosmonaut (Soyuz 6)
1997
Died, of a heart attack, Georgi Stepanovich Shonin, Soviet cosmonaut (Soyuz 6)
2001 15:02:22 GMT
NASA launched the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter.
NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey is the remaining part of the Mars Surveyor 2001 Project, which originally consisted of two separately launched missions, The Mars Surveyor 2001 Orbiter and the Mars Surveyor 2001 Lander. The lander spacecraft was cancelled as part of the reorganization of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA. The orbiter, renamed the 2001 Mars Odyssey, was nominally planned to orbit Mars for three years with the objective of conducting a detailed mineralogical analysis of the planet's surface from orbit and measuring the radiation environment. The mission had as its primary science goals to gather data to help determine whether the environment on Mars was ever conducive to life, to characterize the climate and geology of Mars, and to study potential radiation hazards to possible future astronaut missions. The orbiter also acted (and is acting, as of 2005) as a communications relay for [future] missions to Mars over a period of five years.
The 2001 Mars Odyssey was launched on 7 April 2001. In August, during the cruise to Mars, the MARIE instrument failed to respond during a routine data transfer and was put into hibernation. Attempts to revive the instrument were successful in March 2002 and MARIE began taking scientific data from orbit on 13 March. After a seven month cruise the spacecraft reached Mars on 24 October 2001. The spacecraft used a 19.7 minute propulsive maneuver to transfer into an 18.6 hour elliptical capture orbit and used aerobraking until 11 January 2002, when the spacecraft pulled out of the aerobraking orbit into a 201 x 500 km orbit. This orbit was trimmed over the next few weeks until it became a 2-hour, approximately 400 x 400 km polar science orbit on 30 January 2002. The science mapping mission began on 19 February 2002, and on 28 May 2002, NASA reported that Odyssey's GRS had detected large amounts of hydrogen, a sign that there must be ice lying within a meter of the planet's surface. The Orbiter acts as a communications relay for the Mars Exploration Rovers, which arrived in January 2004, and will possibly also do so for other future missions. Data was collected from orbit until the end of the 917 day nominal mission in July 2004, and the mission has been extended for another Martian year, until September 2006.
The 2001 Mars Odyssey carries star cameras, the Mars Radiation Environment Experiment (MARIE), which measures the near-space radiation environment as related to the radiation-related risk to human explorers, the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS), which maps the mineralogy of the Martian surface using a high-resolution camera and a thermal infrared imaging spectrometer, and the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer (GRS), which maps the elemental composition of the surface and determines the abundance of hydrogen in the shallow subsurface.
The main body of the 2001 Mars Odyssey is a box of 2.2 meters x 1.7 meters x 2.6 meters. The orbiter is divided into two modules, the upper equipment module and the lower propulsion module. The equipment module holds the equipment deck which supports the engineering components and the science instruments. Above the equipment module, connected by struts, is the science deck, holding the star cameras, high energy neutron detector, UHF antenna, the THEMIS instrument and a deployable 6 meter boom holding the gamma sensor head for the GRS. A set of solar array panels extends out from one side of the main bus. A parabolic high-gain dish antenna is mounted on a mast extending from one corner of the bottom of the bus. The MARIE instrument is mounted inside the spacecraft. In the propulsion module are the fuel, oxidizer and helium pressurization tanks, and the main engine. The main engine is a hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide rocket which can produce 65.3 kg thrust, mounted in the bottom part of the propulsion module. The spacecraft had a launch mass of 725.0 kg, including 348.7 kg of fuel.
Attitude control is provided by four 0.1 kg thrusters and the spacecraft can be turned using four 2.3 kg thrusters. The spacecraft is three-axis stabilized using three primary reaction wheels and one backup. Navigation is provided by a Sun sensor, a star camera, and an inertial measurement unit. Power is provided by the gallium arsenide solar cells in the solar panel and a 16 amp-hr nickel hydrogen battery. Communications between the orbiter and Earth are in X-band via the high-gain antenna, and communications between the orbiter and any Mars landers are via the UHF antenna. Thermal control is achieved using a system of heaters, radiators, louvers, insulating blankets and thermal paint. Command and data handling is through a RAD6000 computer with 128 Mbytes RAM and 3 Mbytes of non-volatile memory.
See also the 2001 Mars Odyssey Home Page - NASA/JPL
NASA drawing
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=2001-014A
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