On This Day in Space and ScienceA Timeline by Date

Real basis

• January 1 (1801): Piazzi discovers Ceres, the first asteroid found by humans; in 2006 it was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

• January 3 (2019): Chang'e 4 lands on the far side of the Moon, the first soft landing there by a human probe.

• January 7 (1610): Galileo sees a few "little stars" beside Jupiter through his homemade telescope; within days he realizes they are orbiting Jupiter.

• January 8 (1942): Stephen Hawking is born, exactly 300 years after Galileo's death.

• January 28 (1986): The Space Shuttle Challenger breaks apart 73 seconds after liftoff, killing all seven astronauts.

• January 31 (1958): The US launches Explorer 1; its Geiger counter finds the Van Allen radiation belts surrounding Earth.

• February 7 (1984): Bruce McCandless makes the first untethered spacewalk, about 100 m from the Space Shuttle.

• February 11 (2016): LIGO announces the first direct detection of gravitational waves, about a hundred years after Einstein predicted them.

• February 12 (1809): Darwin is born.

• February 14 (1990): From about 6 billion km away, Voyager 1 looks back and photographs Earth: the "Pale Blue Dot", a speck of dust hanging in sunlight.

• February 14 (1946): ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, is shown to the public.

• February 15 (1564): Galileo is born.

• February 17 (1600): Giordano Bruno is burned at the stake in Rome. He had argued that the universe is infinite and that the stars are distant suns.

• February 18 (1930): Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto while comparing photographic plates.

• February 18 (2021): The Perseverance rover lands in Jezero Crater, where it will look for traces of ancient life.

• February 20 (1962): John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the Earth.

• February 28 (1953): Watson and Crick realize DNA is a double helix, with bases pairing up two by two.

• March 7 (2009): The Kepler space telescope launches; it goes on to find thousands of exoplanets.

• March 10 (1977): Astronomers unexpectedly discover the rings of Uranus during an occultation observation.

• March 13 (1781): William Herschel discovers Uranus, the first planet ever found with a telescope.

• March 14 (1879): Einstein is born. 139 years later on the same day, in 2018, Hawking dies.

• March 18 (1965): Alexei Leonov steps out of Voskhod 2 for the first spacewalk in history. His spacesuit ballooned in the vacuum and he almost could not get back inside.

• April 10 (2019): The Event Horizon Telescope releases the first image of a black hole, the one at the center of galaxy M87.

• April 12 (1961): Gagarin enters space aboard Vostok 1 and circles the Earth once, in about 108 minutes.

• April 18 (1955): Einstein dies.

• April 24 (1970): China's first artificial satellite, Dongfanghong 1, is launched and plays the song "The East Is Red" in space.

• April 24 (1990): The Hubble Space Telescope rides into orbit on the Space Shuttle Discovery.

• April 25 (1953): Nature publishes Watson and Crick's DNA double helix paper, only a little over one page long.

• April 30 (1916): Claude Shannon is born. He later founded information theory, turning "information" into something that can be measured.

• May 5 (1961): Alan Shepard flies the first American crewed suborbital flight, lasting about 15 minutes.

• May 15 (2021): The Tianwen-1 lander lands in Utopia Planitia on Mars, carrying the Zhurong rover.

• May 20 (1964): Penzias and Wilson record a noise in their antenna that will not go away; it is later confirmed as the cosmic microwave background.

• May 29 (1919): Eddington and others observe a total solar eclipse and measure starlight bending near the Sun, confirming general relativity.

• June 16 (1963): Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space.

• June 23 (1912): Alan Turing is born.

• June 30 (1908): A huge explosion over Tunguska in Siberia flattens about 2,000 km² of forest. Today's International Asteroid Day was created to commemorate it.

• July 1 (1858): Darwin and Wallace's papers on natural selection are read together at the Linnean Society in London.

• July 4 (2012): CERN announces the discovery of the Higgs boson.

• July 5 (1687): Newton's Principia Mathematica is published.

• July 10 (1856): Nikola Tesla is born.

• July 12 (2022): The Webb Space Telescope releases its first full-color science images.

• July 14 (2015): New Horizons flies past Pluto and photographs the heart-shaped ice plain on its surface.

• July 16 (1994): Fragments of comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 begin hitting Jupiter one after another, over 6 days.

• July 20 (1969): Apollo 11 lands on the Moon. Armstrong: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

• July 20 (1976): Viking 1 lands on Mars and sends back the first photos from the Martian surface.

• July 24 (1969): The three Apollo 11 astronauts splash down in the Pacific Ocean and return safely to Earth.

• August 6 (2012): The Curiosity rover lands in Gale Crater, descending on a "sky crane".

• August 6 (1991): Tim Berners-Lee announces the World Wide Web project, open to anyone.

• August 12 (2018): The Parker Solar Probe launches; it later becomes the closest and fastest human-made object to the Sun.

• August 15 (1977): The Big Ear radio telescope records the "Wow!" signal, which never appeared again.

• August 20 (1977): Voyager 2 launches; it is the only probe to have visited both Uranus and Neptune.

• August 24 (2006): The International Astronomical Union adopts a new definition of a planet, and Pluto is classified as a dwarf planet.

• August 25 (2012): Voyager 1 crosses the heliopause, becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space.

• September 5 (1977): Voyager 1 launches, carrying a golden record addressed to extraterrestrials.

• September 12 (1962): Kennedy speaks at Rice University: "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade … not because it is easy, but because it is hard."

• September 14 (2015): LIGO records its first gravitational-wave signal, GW150914, from two black holes merging 1.3 billion light-years away.

• September 15 (2017): Cassini burns up in Saturn's atmosphere, ending 13 years of exploring Saturn.

• September 23 (1846): Galle finds Neptune near the position Le Verrier had calculated, the first planet "calculated" with mathematics.

• September 28 (1928): Fleming notices that a mold of Penicillium in a culture dish has killed the bacteria around it.

• October 4 (1957): The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, and the space age begins.

• October 6 (1995): Mayor and Queloz announce the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star.

• October 15 (2003): Yang Liwei flies into space aboard Shenzhou 5, making China the third country to launch humans into space on its own.

• October 19 (2017): Pan-STARRS discovers ʻOumuamua, the first confirmed interstellar object.

• October 29 (1969): ARPANET sends its first message. It was meant to be "LOGIN", but only "LO" went through before the system crashed.

• November 2 (2000): The International Space Station receives its first long-term crew, and people have lived in space ever since.

• November 3 (1957): Sputnik 2 puts the dog Laika into orbit, the first animal to orbit the Earth.

• November 7 (1867): Marie Curie is born, the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

• November 8 (1895): Röntgen discovers X-rays and, a few weeks later, photographs the bones of his wife's hand.

• November 9 (1934): Carl Sagan is born.

• November 12 (2014): The Philae lander touches down on comet 67P, the first landing by humans on a comet's surface.

• November 16 (1974): The Arecibo radio telescope sends a 1,679-bit message toward the globular cluster M13.

• November 20 (1998): Zarya, the first module of the International Space Station, launches.

• November 24 (1859): Darwin's On the Origin of Species is published.

• November 25 (1915): Einstein presents the field equations of general relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences.

• November 26 (2018): InSight lands on Mars to listen for "marsquakes".

• December 2 (1942): Chicago Pile-1, led by Fermi, achieves the first controlled nuclear chain reaction.

• December 7 (1972): The Apollo 17 astronauts photograph the whole Earth: "The Blue Marble".

• December 10 (1896): Nobel dies. The Nobel Prizes have been awarded on this day every year since.

• December 14 (2013): Chang'e 3 lands in Sinus Iridum on the Moon, and the Yutu rover begins to roam.

• December 17 (1903): The Wright brothers make the first powered, crewed flight, lasting 12 seconds.

• December 17 (2020): Chang'e 5 returns to Earth with about 1.7 kg of lunar soil.

• December 24 (1968): The Apollo 8 astronauts photograph "Earthrise" from lunar orbit: Earth rising over the lunar horizon.

• December 25 (1642): Newton is born (by the Julian calendar then used in England).

• December 25 (2021): The Webb Space Telescope launches.

• December 27 (1831): Darwin sets sail on the Beagle, beginning a voyage around the world of nearly five years.

Related research

These studies relate to this topic but are not direct proof of this page.

• Finding the Higgs particle: The Large Hadron Collider found a new particle at about 125 GeV, confirming a prediction made 48 years earlier.

  Source: ATLAS Collaboration, Physics Letters B 2012, "Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC"

• Cosmic microwave background: Two Bell Labs researchers couldn't get rid of the noise in their antenna, and finally realized it was the afterglow of the Big Bang. They won the 1978 Nobel Prize.

  Source: Penzias & Wilson, The Astrophysical Journal 1965, "A measurement of excess antenna temperature at 4080 Mc/s"

• Shadow of a black hole: Radio telescopes around the world formed an Earth-sized “virtual telescope” and photographed the shadow of the black hole at the center of M87.

  Source: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, The Astrophysical Journal Letters 2019, "First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The shadow of the supermassive black hole"

• Gravitational waves: Two black holes merged 1.3 billion years ago, and ripples in spacetime were finally heard by humans, confirming Einstein's prediction from a century earlier.

  Source: Abbott et al. (LIGO & Virgo), Physical Review Letters 2016, "Observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger"

• The first exoplanet: A giant planet was found around 51 Pegasi, circling its star in 4 days. The solar system was no longer unique. Nobel Prize 2019.

  Source: Mayor & Queloz, Nature 1995, "A Jupiter-mass companion to a solar-type star"

• The double helix: A one-page paper proposed that DNA is a double helix, and base pairing hinted at how genetic information is copied.

  Source: Watson & Crick, Nature 1953, "Molecular structure of nucleic acids: A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid"

• Natural selection: Darwin and Wallace jointly published the theory of natural selection. The next year, On the Origin of Species came out.

  Source: Darwin & Wallace, Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society 1858, "On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection"

• Penicillin: Mold that grew by accident in a petri dish killed the bacteria around it, and the antibiotic age began.

  Source: Fleming, British Journal of Experimental Pathology 1929, "On the antibacterial action of cultures of a penicillium"

• The World Wide Web: An internal proposal, which the boss annotated “vague but exciting.” It later became the World Wide Web.

  Source: Berners-Lee, CERN 1989, "Information management: A proposal"

• Recipe of the universe: The Planck satellite measured the tiny fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background: ordinary matter makes up about 5% of the Universe's total energy, dark matter about 27%, and the rest is dark energy.

  Source: Planck Collaboration, Astronomy & Astrophysics 2020, "Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters"