We live in a world where science is all around us, so it’s sometimes easy to forget how far we’ve come in such a short time. Here is a list of scientific achievements for this week:
1630 – Italian astronomer and physicist Niccolo Zucchi (1586 – 1670)) saw the belts of Jupiter’s surface for the first time. He later went on to see details of the Martian surface and experiment with the first reflecting telescopes. The Moon crater Zucchius is named in honor of his work.
1969 – A lunar module of Apollo 10 flew within nine miles of the moon’s surface. The mission was a rehearsal for the first lunar landing a few months later and tested all the equipment , systems and techniques used in the actual landing. The mission was flown by Thomas P. Stafford (Commander), John W. Young (Command Module Pilot) and Eugene A. Cernan (Lunar Module Pilot). It set the record for the highest speed attained by a manned vehicle at 39,897 km/h (11.08 km/s or 24,791 mph).
1990 – The Hubble Space Telescope sent back its first photographs. Named in memory of Edwin Hubble who discovered the universe was expanding, the HST has played a vital part in astronomy since it’s launch and the data it provides has been used in over nine thousand scientific papers.
2003 – The Digital Einstein project made hundreds of Albert Einstein’s scientific papers, personal letters and humanist essays available over the Internet. Einstein originally gave the papers to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in his will. Einstein’s theories have been the mainstay of modern thoughts in physics for over a century.
2010 – A research group led by prominent genome researcher, Craig Venter, assembled the entire genome of a small bacterium in a yeast cell, starting with mail-order DNA. The team has since gone on to create a fully functional bacterial cell.
