Themes > Science > Physics > Astrophysics > The History of High-Energy Astrophysics > 1965-1969


20 Jul 1969
16:18 EST

Neil Armstrong reports back to Mission Control Houston "The Eagle has landed" -- the Apollo 11 Lunar Module containing himself and Edwin Aldrin has landed on the Moon. Shortly thereafter Armstrong becomes the first human to step on the Moon.

23 May 1969

Co-launch of the Vela 5A and Vela 5B satellites to monitor compliance with the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Together with the Vela 6A and 6B satellites, these satellites are generally credited for the first discovery of gamma-ray burst sources.

24 Dec 1968

Crew of Apollo 8 become first humans to orbit the Moon.

27 Mar 1968

Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin is killed in air crash accident.

28 Apr 1967

Launch of the Fourth Octahedral Research Satellite (ORS-4; ERS-18). ORS-4 carried gamma-ray sensors that were the first to detect the diffuse cosmic gamma-ray background above 3.0 MeV (the upper limit of Ranger 3, the only previous gamma-ray detector to observe the gamma-ray background).

27 Jan 1967

A fire in the Apollo 1 capsule during a test on the launch pad kills three American astronauts: Virgil Grissom, Ed White II, and Roger Chaffee.

Aug 1966

The position of the X-ray source Sco X-1 is localized to a few arcminutes (Gursky et al. 1966, ApJ, 146, 310) enabling its optical counterpart, a blue star with an unusual emission-line spectrum, to be identified (Sandage et al. 1966, ApJ, 146, 316).

1 Mar 1966

Venera 3 ceases to send data just as it arrives at Venus. However, the landing module did descend into the Venusian atmosphere, making this the first landing on another planet.

14 Jan 1966

Sergei Korolev, father of the Soviet space program, dies during surgery.

16 Nov 1965

Launch of Venera 3, the Soviet probe to Venus.


Information provided by: http://guinan.gsfc.nasa.gov