This Week in Science
This Week in Science Archive: June-December 2007 January-December 2008 January-December 2009 January-December 2010 January-December 2011
January
- January 3, 1970: a fireball was visible over a large area of the U.S. midwest. The meteorite was the first to be detected by the Prairie Network operated by the Smithsonian Institution's Astrophysical Observatory since 1964. Its path was photographed by two of the system's 16 cameras funded by a NASA grant. Using these records, scientists calculated the meteorite's impact point. Gunther Schwartz, field manager of the network found the 21.6-lb meteorite six days later within a half-mile of the predicted site, about 45 miles east of Tulsa, OK. The fast retrieval enabled examination of radioactivity produced by the meteorite's exposure to cosmic rays, looking for clues to how the universe was created.
- January 9, 1968: the Surveyor 7 space probe made a soft landing on the moon, the final spacecraft of the Surveyor series to do so. It marked the end of the American series of unmanned explorations of the lunar surface, and was to be followed by the landing of an Apollo crew. Its mission included taking TV pictures after landing, determining relative chemical element abundance and manipulating lunar material. In addition to touchdown dynamics data, it obtained thermal and radar reflectivity data. A solar cell array produced up to 85-watts of electrical power, stored in batteries and used for communications.
- January 17, 1886: Glenn L. Martin was born on this date. He was an American aeronaut and inventor whose bombers and flying boats played important roles in WW II. His first planes were built in collaboration with mechanics from his auto shop, working in a disused church building that Martin rented. In 1909, Martin made his first successful flight; by 1911 he numbered among the most famous of the pioneer birdmen. He incorporated the Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company in 1912 and was the senior aircraft manufacturer in the U.S. for 40 years. The vast majority of the more than 11,000 Martin Bomber planes built by the company pioneered the doctrine of air power in the 1920's and 1930's and served in all theaters in World War II. His donations to the University of Maryland led to the creation of the Glenn L. Martin Institute of Technology and the buildings named in his honor.
- January 23, 1911: Marie Curie's nomination to the French Academy of Sciences is voted down by the Academy's all-male membership despite her having won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. She went on to win a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, a few months after being denied membership to the Academy.
- January 30, 1950: Development of the hydrogen fusion bomb (H-bomb) was ordered by U.S. President Truman. Five months earlier, the United States had lost its nuclear supremacy when the Soviet Union successfully detonated an atomic bomb at their test site in Kazakhstan. Then, several weeks after that, British and U.S. intelligence came to the conclusion that Klaus Fuchs, a top-ranking scientist in the U.S. nuclear program, was a spy for the Soviet Union. These two events, and the fact that the Soviets now knew everything that the Americans did about how to build a hydrogen bomb, led Truman to approve massive funding for the superpower race to complete the world's first "superbomb." The codename of "Super" for the project reflected the far greater power of this thermonuclear device over the earlier fission bombs used to end WW II.
The content on this page is from multiple sources including Infoplease This Day in History.
