Here’s a list of scientific achievements for this week (and some rather bad wigs!):
585 BC – The first known prediction of a solar eclipse was made in Greece by Thales of Miletus. The eclipse interrupted a battle between the Medes and Lydians who decided it was a sign and signed a truce.
1667 – French mathematician, Abraham De Moivre, was born. He invented De Moivre’s formula that links complex number theory and trigonometry, as well as working on probability theory and the normal distribution.
1925 – John Scopes was indicted for teaching the Darwinian theory in school. He was convicted and fined, though the conviction was later overturned by the Tennessee High Court.
1951 – Sally K. Ride was born. Ride joined NASA in 1978 and became the first American female and youngest astronaut to travel into space on the space shuttle Challenger mission STS-7 in 1983.
1971 – Mariner 9, the American deep space probe, was launched on its way to Mars. The probe was the first to orbit another planet and studied the atmosphere of Mars while also mapping over eighty percent of the surface.
1999 – The space shuttle Discovery became the first shuttle to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) on mission STS-96. The mission delivered the spacehab and other supplies for outfitting the station.
2008 – NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander landed in the Arctic plains region near Mars’ north polar cap. The Probe was equipped with instruments designed to find environments suitable for microbial life and search for traces of water. On June 19 2008, NASA announced that lumps of bright material discovered were in fact water ice.
