On December 26, 1791, English mathematician and pioneer computer scientist Charles Babbage was born. He spent much of his life trying to plan and build a machine that would make as many calculations as possible. Error free, of course. He had read about the…
On December 17, 1972, the recovery ship USS Ticonderoga picked up the Apollo 17 command module from the Pacific Ocean. The splashdown, a return-to-Earth routine of manned spacecraft in that day, marked the capping moment of the capping mission of the Apollo manned lunar…
On December 6, 1901, American landscape photographer Eliot Furness Porter was born. A chemical engineering graduate from Harvard and a medical graduate from its School of Medicine, he taught biochemistry at the university. As a boy on family camping trips, Porter had been attracted…
On December 3, 2018, Dr. David Saint-Jacques will co-pilot Russian Soyuz spacecraft for the six-hour journey to the International Space Station [ISS]. The crew trio includes its Russian mission commander Oleg Kononenko and American astronaut Anne McClain. During his six-and-a-half-month stint aboard ISS, Saint-Jacques…
On November 13, 1981, after eight years in the planning and construction, the Canadarm first flew aboard STS-2. Officially known as the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System, the RMS was Canada’s contribution to the Space Shuttle Program. Intended to assist moving materials around from and…
On November 10, 2003, Congaree was designated a National Park, a South Carolina wilderness area, that was formerly the Congaree Swamp National Monument. It is an alluvial or flood plain, part of a river system where sediment deposits build up on one side and…
On October 31, 1994, Death Valley became a National Park. Located in eastern California’s Mojave Desert, Death Valley is in the lowest, driest place in North America, and the hottest in the world. Its valley floor is 86 m (282 ft) below sea level…
On September 30, 1905, bird photographer Alfred Donald Trounson, OAM, was born. He spent most of his life as a British diplomat on government assignments in Italy and New York. At his last posting in Australia, the song of a backyard bird launched Trounson’s…
On September 17, 1857, self-taught physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was born in Russia. Enamoured by the possibility of space flight and the potential of rockets to make it happen, he wrote about the subject in science fiction and technical papers… in hundreds of publications. He…
On September 5, 1892, Danish anthropologist and cartographer Therkel Mathiassen was born. He studied Arctic cultures at sites from Greenland to Nunavut and followed the spread of culture and emigration of Inuit ancestors. He named these the Thule people. Mathiassen located little groups of…