On July 9, 1979, NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter. It came within 354,000 miles (570,000 kilometers) of the planet's cloud tops. Voyager 2 was one of two space probes launched by NASA in 1977 to study the...

On July 8, 2011, the space shuttle Atlantis launched on its final mission. Atlantis was the last of NASA's space shuttles to fly into space. It went on 33 missions since 1985, ferrying astronauts to and from space stations, and even...

On July 7, 1961, the U.S. Air Force launched a satellite called Discoverer 26 into orbit with a classified payload. Discoverer 26 was part of a series of reconnaissance or spy satellites whose missions were kept top-secret by the...

On July 6, 1938, an American astronomer named Seth Barnes Nicholson discovered Jupiter's moon Lysithea. Nicholson spotted Lysithea from Mount Wilson Observatory in California, where he had previously discovered three more Jovian moons....

On July 5, 2015, the Russian Progress 60 cargo ship successfully docked with the International Space Station. The spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 3. It was packed with more than 3 tons of food,...

On July 2, 1985, the European Space Agency launched the Giotto space probe to get a close-up look at Halley's Comet. Nearly nine months later on March 14, 1986, Giotto became the first spacecraft to observe of a comet up close when it...

On June 30, 1908, a giant fireball exploded over the forests of Tunguska in Siberia. The impact leveled hundreds of miles of forest, and the exact cause is a bit of a mystery. At the time of the explosion, it was too difficult to reach...

Happy Birthday, Kennedy Space Center! On July 1, 1962, NASA established the Launch Operations Center — which was later renamed the Kennedy Space Center — on the east coast of Florida. After President John F. Kennedy famously said that...

On June 18, 1983, NASA astronaut Sally Ride became America's first woman in space after she and four colleagues blasted off on the space shuttle Challenger for the STS-7 mission. The astronauts spent 6 days in space deployed two...

On June 17, 1985, the Space Shuttle Discovery launched on NASA's STS-51-G mission, carrying payload specialist Sultan Salman Abdulaziz Al Saud, a Royal Saudi Air Force pilot who became the first Arab and first Muslim in space. And...

On June 16, 1963, Valentina Nikolayeva Tereshkova became the first woman to travel into space. Tereshkova, a cosmonaut with then-Soviet Russia, launched into space on the Vostok 6 mission and orbited Earth 48 times in 70.8 hours. That's...

On June 15, 2011, Iran launched satellite Rasad-1 into orbit around Earth. Rasad-1 (the name means Observation 1 in Farsi) is an imaging satellite that was sent into a 162-mile orbit by an Iranian Safir rocket. This was Iran's third...

On June 14, 1914, the first patent for a liquid-fueled rocket design was granted to Dr. Robert Goddard, an American scientist and rocket pioneer. In the patent, Goddard described a rocket fueled with liquid propellants (liquid nitrous...

On June 13, 2013, China's crewed Shenzhou 10 spacecraft made its successful docking with the Tiangong-1 space lab, marking the country's second mission to the mini-space station. This kicked off 12 days of docked operations for Shenzhou...

On June 12, 1967, Venera 4 was launched into space on a mission to Venus, thus becoming the first spacecraft to transmit data from another planet's atmosphere. This was a Russian probe designed to study the atmosphere of Venus down to...

On June 11, 2015, NASA astronaut Terry Virts, Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency and Russian Anton Shkaplerov returned to Earth after 199 days on the International Space Station. The trio made up the...

On June 10, 1854, Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann gave his classic lecture on curved space. Riemann was a 19th century mathematician from Germany. His landmark lecture included a workable definition of how someone might measure the...

On June 9, 1952, the Abee meteorite fell in Alberta, Canada, at 11:05 at night. The space stone weighed nearly 326 pounds and was recovered from a 6 foot- deep crater in a wheat field when it was found five days later. A piece of it is...

On June 8, 1959, NASA's rocket-powered X-15 experimental plane made its first glide flight. The X-15 rocket plane was part of a series of experimental hypersonic aircraft. This flight marked the beginning of almost a decade of research...

On June 7, 1965, after a four-day mission and 62 orbits, NASA's Gemini 4 mission returned to Earth with an Atlantic Ocean splashdown. Gemini 4 was NASA's 10th manned spaceflight. It included the first spacewalk by an American astronaut....

On June 6, 1995, American astronaut Norman Thagard broke NASA's space endurance record at the time of 84 days, 1 hour and 16 minutes while aboard the Russian space station Mir.



Thagard, a veteran of four shuttle flights, was...

On June 5, 2002, the space shuttle Endeavour launched on the STS-111 mission from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the International Space Station. The launch was originally scheduled for May 30th, but was delayed first by bad...

On June 4, 2010, the first Falcon 9 rocket built by SpaceX blasted off from Cape Canaveral on its maiden voyage and reached orbit. Space Exploration Technologies, or Space X, was founded by billionaire Elon Musk, an internet entrepreneur...

On June 3, 1965, NASA astronaut Ed White became the first American to walk in space. White left the safety of his Gemini 4 spacecraft equipped with a spacesuit, a tether and a small gas gun for maneuvering. The spacewalk occurred just...