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1905
M Wolf discovered asteroid #565 Marbachia; and P Gotz discovered asteroid #564 Dudu.
1917
R Schorr discovered asteroid #869 Mellena.
1926
The first flight over the North Pole was purportedly made by Admiral Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett. (Later discovery of Byrd's diary seems to indicate the event did not actually happen.)
1931
Born, Vance DeVoe Brand, Longmont Colorado, astronaut (Apollo 18, STS-5, 41B, 35)
1949
Born, Oleg Yuriyevich Atkov, Russian cosmonaut (Soyuz T-10)
1960
NASA conducted an off-the-pad abort test ("beach abort") as a qualification of the structure and launch escape system for a simulated pad abort. The test was successful.
1962
A LASER beam was successfully bounced off the Moon for the first time.
1965 07:55:00 GMT
USSR launched Luna 5, which attempted a soft landing on the Moon. It instead crashed into the Lunar surface at the Sea of Clouds when its retrorockets failed to fire.
1971 01:11:00 GMT
NASA launched Mariner-H (also called Mariner 8) toward Mars, but the booster failed approximately 6 minutes after lift-off and the probe failed to reach orbit.
Mariner-H, also commonly known as Mariner 8, was part of the Mariner Mars 71 project. It was intended to go into Mars orbit and return images and data. Mariner 8 was launched 9 May 1971 on an Atlas-Centaur SLV-3C booster (AC-24). The main Centaur engine was ignited 265 seconds after launch, but the upper stage began to oscillate in pitch and tumbled out of control. The Centaur stage shut down 365 seconds after launch due to starvation caused by the tumbling. The Centaur and spacecraft payload separated and re-entered the Earth's atmosphere approximately 1500 km (930 miles) downrange and fell into the Atlantic Ocean about 560 km (350 miles) north of Puerto Rico.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=MARINH
1972
T Smirnova discovered asteroids #1903 Adzhimushkaj and #1904 Massevitch.
1983
T Smirnova discovered asteroids #1903 Adzhimushkaj and #1904 Massevitch.
2003 04:29:25 GMT
Japan launched Hayabusa (Muses-C), a sample return mission sent to asteroid 1998 SF36.
The primary scientific objective of the Hayabusa (formerly Muses-C) mission is to collect a surface sample of material from an asteroid (25143 Itokawa/1998 SF36) and return the sample to Earth for analysis. It is also a technology demonstration mission. Other scientific objectives of the mission include detailed studies of the asteroid's shape, spin state, topography, color, composition, density, photometric and polarimetric properties, interior and history.
The spacecraft was launched on 9 May 2003 on an M-5 solid fuel booster from the Kagoshima launch center. Following launch, the name Muses-C was changed to Hayabusa (Japanese for falcon), and the spacecraft was put into a transfer orbit to bring it to asteroid 25143 Itokawa (1998 SF36), a 0.3 x 0.7 km near-Earth object. The ion engines were successfully test-fired from 27 May to the middle of June 2003. Hayabusa flew by Earth on 19 May 2004 at an altitude of 3725 km at 6:23 UT. Rendezvous with the asteroid will occur in summer 2005, the spacecraft will not go into orbit around the asteroid, but will remain in a station-keeping heliocentric orbit close by. Hayabusa will initially survey the asteroid surface for about three months from a distance of about 20 km in the "home position", a region roughly on a line connecting the Earth with the asteroid on the sunward side. This is global mapping phase 1, the phase angle during this phase will be small, no greater than 20 - 25 degrees. Global mapping phase 2, which will last for about a week, will take place from a position near the terminator, affording high phase angle views of the asteroid. Following this the spacecraft will move back to the home position and then move close to the surface for a series of soft landings and collection of samples at three sites. On-board optical navigation will be employed extensively during this period because the long communication delay prohibits ground-based real-time commanding. The samples, with a total mass of approximately one gram, will be held inside a separate re-entry capsule. (The lander was also to deploy a small rover supplied by NASA onto the surface of the asteroid, but the rover was cancelled by NASA due to budget constraints.) All operations at Itokawa must take into account the extremely low gravity at the asteroid's surface. After a few months in close proximity to the asteroid, the spacecraft will fire its engines to begin its cruise back to Earth. The re-entry capsule will be detached from the main spacecraft at a distance of about 300,000 to 400,000 km from the Earth, and the capsule will coast on a ballistic trajectory, re-entering the Earth's atmosphere in June 2007. The capsule will experience peak decellerations of about 25 G and heating rates approximately 30 times those experienced by the Apollo spacecraft. It will land via parachute near Woomera, Australia. (This flight plan is a change from the original one to launch in July 2002 to the asteroid Nereus.)
The lander will be equipped with a universal sample collection device which will gather roughly one gram of surface samples taken from the landings at 3 different locations. The device consists of a funnel-shaped collection horn, 40 cm in diameter at the end, which is to be placed over the sampling area. A pyrotechnic device fires a 10 gram metal projectile down the barrel of the horn at 200 - 300 m/sec. The projectile strikes the surface producing a small impact crater in the surface of the asteroid and propelling ejecta fragments back up the horn, where some of it is funnelled into a sample collection chamber. Prior to each sampling run, the spacecraft will drop a small target plate onto the surface from about 30 m altitude to use as a landmark to ensure the relative horizontal velocity between the spacecraft and asteroid surface is zero during the sampling. After sampling the samples will be stored in the re-entry capsule for return to Earth.
The rover, or Small Science Vehicle (SSV), was to have been a NASA contribution to the mission but was cancelled due to budget contraints. The SSV would have been dropped onto the surface of the asteroid by the Hayabusa spacecraft. The rover goals were to make texture, composition and morphology measurements of the surface layer at scales smaller than 1 cm, investigations of lateral heterogeneity at small scales, investigation of vertical regolith structure by taking advantage of disturbances of the surface layer by microrover operations, and to measure constraints on the mechanical and thermal properties of the surface layer. The rover would weigh about 1 kg and would be capable of rolling, climbing, or hopping around on the surface of the asteroid. It would have run on solar power and carry a multi-band imaging camera, a near-infrared point spectrometer, and an alpha/X-ray spectrometer (AXS).
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=2003-019A
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