Astro Anniversaries

March

Day	Year	Event
1 Mar	1870	Eugène Antoniadi born. Greek-French astronomer.
1 Mar	1927	George Abell born. Professor of astronomy at UCLA.
1 Mar	1966	Soviet space probe Venera 3 crashed on Venus, becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet’s surface.
2 Mar	1840	Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers died. German physician and astronomer.
2 Mar	1972	Pioneer 10 space probe launched from Cape Canaveral with a mission to explore the outer planets.
2 Mar	1978	Czech Vladimír Remek became the first non-Russian or non-American to go into space, when he was launched aboard Soyuz 28.
2 Mar	1998	Data sent from the Galileo spacecraft indicated that Jupiter’s moon Europa has a liquid ocean under a thick crust of ice.
3 Mar	1969	Apollo 9 launched. It carried out a full test of the lunar landing mission in Earth orbit. Astronauts McDivitt and Schweickart tested the lunar module, and rendezvoused and docked with the command and service modules piloted by Scott.
4 Mar	1675	John Flamsteed was appointed as the first Astronomer Royal.
4 Mar	1904	George Gamow born. American theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He was an early advocate and developer of Lemaître’s Big Bang theory.
4 Mar	1923	Patrick Moore born. Amateur astronomer and host of the BBC Sky at Night television programme.
4 Mar	1979	An image taken with the Voyager 1 spacecraft camera revealed the faint ring system of Jupiter for the first time.
4 Mar	2000	Hermann Brück died. German-born astronomer. German-Scottish physicist and astronomer. He was the 7th Astronomer Royal for Scotland (1957-75).
5 Mar	1827	Pierre-Simon Laplace died.
6 Mar	1787	Joseph von Fraunhofer born. German physicist and astronomer.
7 Mar	1792	John Herschel born. English mathematician and astronomer.
7 Mar	1837	Henry Draper born. American physician and amateur astronomer.
7 Mar	2009	The space observatory Kepler was launched by NASA to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.
8 Mar	1804	Alvan Clark born. American astronomer and telescope maker.
9 Mar	1889	William M Smart born. Scottish astronomer. Author of many books on astronomy, including his classic Textbook on Spherical Astronomy.
10 Mar	1977	James Elliot, Ted Dunham and Jessica Mink discovered faint, dark rings around Uranus using instruments on the Kuiper Airborne Observatory.
11 Mar	1811	Urbain Le Verrier, born. French mathematician and astronomer.
12 Mar	1835	Simon Newcomb born. Canadian-American astronomer and mathematician.
13 Mar	1789	William Herschel observed Uranus, which he initially believed to be a comet, eventually leading to Uranus being identified as a planet.
13 Mar	1855	Percival Lowell born. American astronomer and mathematician.
14 Mar	1835	Giovanni Schiaparelli born. Italian astronomer and historian.
14 Mar	1879	Albert Einstein born. German-American physicist, engineer and academic. Nobel Prize laureate.
14 Mar	1928	Frank Borman born. American astronaut. Commander of Apollo 8, the first mission to fly around the Moon.
14 Mar	1934	Eugene Cernan born. American astronaut and currently the ‘last man on the Moon’.
14 Mar	1986	The European robotic spacecraft Giotto became the first satellite to observe a comet up close when it flew through – and photographed – Halley’s Comet.
14 Mar	2018	Stephen Hawking died. British theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author.
15 Mar	1932	Alan Bean born. American astronaut on Apollo 12 and the Skylab space station.
15 Mar	2022	Eugene Parker died. He was a ground-breaking solar physicist who virtually created the field of heliophysics in the 1950s and was the first living person to have a space mission – the Parker Solar Probe – named in his honour.
16 Mar	1750	Caroline Herschel born. German-English astronomer.
16 Mar	1926	Using a mixture of gasoline and liquid oxygen, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fuelled rocket.
16 Mar	1966	Gemini 8 was launched with astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott. Mission included the first docking of two spacecraft in orbit.
17 Mar	1846	Friedrich Bessel died. German astronomer, mathematician and physicist.
17 Mar	1930	James Irwin born. American astronaut. Lunar Module pilot on Apollo 15.
17 Mar	1936	Ken Mattingly born. American astronaut on Apollo 16.
18 Mar	2011	Messenger became the first spacecraft to orbit around the planet Mercury.
18 Mar	2020	Alfred Worden died. American astronaut. Command Module pilot for Apollo 15.
19 Mar	1799	William Dawes born. British astronomer. The Dawes Resolution for a telescope (in arcseconds) = 4.56 / Aperture (in inches) or 116 / Aperture (in mm).
20 Mar	1993	Robert Burnham Jr died. American astronomer. Author of the classic three-volume Burnham’s Celestial Handbook.
23 Mar	1749	Pierre-Simon Laplace born. French mathematician and astronomer. Laplace was best known for his investigations into the stability of the solar system.
23 Mar	1837	Richard A Proctor born. Russian-born Soviet and American polymath, theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He was an early advocate and developer of Lemaître’s Big Bang theory.
23 Mar	1840	William Draper took the first astronomical photograph. It was of the Moon, using a daguerreotype-process image exposed for 20 minutes.
23 Mar	1912	Wernher von Braun born. German-American aerospace engineer and space architect.
24 Mar	1893	Walter Baade born. German-born American astronomer who classified stars into two distinct population types (Population I and Population II), the Cepheid variables of which have distinct luminosity curves.
24 Mar	1993	Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker, together with David Levy, discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 at the Palomar Observatory. The comet hit Jupiter the following year.
25 Mar	1655	Christiaan Huygens discovered Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
25 Mar	1951	Harold Ewen and Edward Purcell discovered the 21-cm radio radiation from cold hydrogen in our galaxy, using a horn antenna in the physics building at Harvard University in the USA.
25 Mar	2010	Ben Gascoigne died. New Zealand optical astronomer and expert in photometry.
29 Mar	1807	Heinrich Olbers discovered Vesta, the brightest and second most-massive asteroid.
29 Mar	1890	Harold Spencer Jones born. An authority on positional astronomy, he became the 10th Astronomer Royal.
31 Mar	1727	Isaac Newton died.
31 Mar	1997	Lyman Spitzer died. American theoretical physicist and astronomer. The Spitzer Space Telescope (an infrared space telescope which operated 2003-2020) was named after him.

LAST UPDATED: 2023-02-29