Posts Tagged ‘NASA’

Anniversaries Galore Today

Posted: April 12, 2011 in History
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Don’t know how or why, but lots of historical milestones today.

On this date in 1861, the battle of Fort Sumter began, kicking off the Civil War.  The Washington Post has special coverage for the anniversary which is worth reading.  The Post and the National Park Service are tweeting the Civil War in real time as it happened 150 years ago.

On this date in 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, making a 108-minute flight in his Vostok 1 spacecraft in the middle of the Cold War. Gagarin got his own Google logo to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his milestone voyage:

And finally, on this date in 1981, the first Space Shuttle mission was launched.

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To Infinity and Beyond

Posted: March 29, 2011 in Science
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First image of Mercury

Photo credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Some very cool news for all you astronomy geeks out there:

Early this morning, at 5:20 am EDT, MESSENGER captured this historic image of Mercury. This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System’s innermost planet. Over the subsequent six hours, MESSENGER acquired an additional 363 images before downlinking some of the data to Earth.

According to the NASA press release, approximately 10 days ago, MESSENGER became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, and is expected to take 75,000 images for its mission over the next year, including approximately 1,200 over the next three days. Looking forward to seeing more of these…