Learn about the history of science by reading about the significant scientific events that took place on this day in history.
1995 - Galileo spacecraft arrives at Jupiter.
NASA
NASA's Galileo spacecraft arrived at the planet Jupiter and entered orbit. It would spend the next 8 years in the Jovian system before purposely burning up in Jupiter's atmosphere. It carried the first probe to directly measure Jupiter's atmosphere and was on hand to witness the spectacular collision of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.
1993 - Wolfgang Paul died.
Paul was a German physicist who shares half the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics with Hans G. Dehmelt for their development of the ion trap. The ion trap is a device that uses electric and magnetic fields to capture ions in a vacuum. Paul developed an ion trap that uses radio frequency electric fields using a quadrupole arrangement to capture ions.1979 - Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin died.
Payne was an English/American astronomer who was the first to propose the sun was made up primarily of hydrogen. She showed the absorption spectra lines from the sun corresponded to different temperature levels of hydrogen and helium. Common wisdom of the time had the sun's chemical composition the same as that as Earth.1972 - Last United States mission to the Moon launched.
NASA
Apollo 17 launched from Cape Canaveral on the sixth and final Apollo mission to the Moon. It was also the first (and last) night launch of the Saturn V rocket. Astronauts Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt would spend three days on the surface of the Moon. Commander Cernan would be the last person to set foot on the Moon.
1960 - Walter Noddack died.
Noddack was a German chemist who discovered the element rhenium with Ida Tacke and Otto Berg. Rhenium was the second to last naturally occurring stable element discovered. It was isolated from platinum ore and the mineral columbite. The group announced they had found the element technetium when they bombarded columbite with electrons, but their results were never verified. They named their discovery masurium after the Masuria in Eastern Prussia.1925 - Martin Rodbell died.
National Institutes of Health
Rodbell was an American biochemist who shares the 1994 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Alfred Gilman for their discovery of G-proteins and their role in signal transduction within the cell. G-proteins are a family of proteins that work as switches and intermediary between guanosine diphosphate (GDP) and guanosine triphosphate (GTP) to regulate downstream cell processes.
1905 - Gerard Peter Kuiper was born.
NASA
Kuiper was a Dutch-American astronomer who discovered the moon Miranda orbiting Uranus and the moon Nereid orbiting Neptune. He also predicted the existence of carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere and methane in Titan's atmosphere that proved to be correct. He described a theory of the origin of the Solar System that suggested it formed from a large cloud of gas. One part of the theory has a disk shaped belt outside the Solar System filled with millions of comets approximately 30 to 50 astronomical units from the Sun. This belt was discovered in 1992 and named the Kuiper Belt.
1810 - Theodor Schwann was born.
Henry Smith Williams/The Story of Nineteenth-Century Science (1904)
Schwann was a German physiologist who defined the basic unit of animal tissue structure was the cell and helped begin the study of cell biology. He proved the cellular origin of fingernails, tooth enamel and feathers. He also discovered the digestive enzyme pepsin and coined the term 'metabolism' to describe the chemical reactions in living organisms necessary to stay alive.
