1987 American swimmer Lynne Cox swam across the Bering Sea from the island of Little Diomede in Alaska to Big Diomede, then part of the Soviet Union, a distance of 3.7km in water temperatures of about 40 degrees Farenheit.
1976 NASA’s Viking 2 Orbiter entered Mars orbit.
1961 Russian Cosmonaut Gherman Titov, at age 26, circled Earth for a full day in the Vostok 2 spacecraft. Titov was the first man to sleep in space, for one full orbit, and to this day is the youngest man to have flown in space.
1959 NASA launched the Explorer 6 satellite, a small, spheroidal satellite designed to study trapped radiation of various energies, galactic cosmic rays, geomagnetism, radio propagation in the upper atmosphere, and the flux of micrometeorites.
1779 German geographer Carl Ritter was born in Quedlinburg. He is considered one of the founders of the modern science of geography, having written the 19-volume Die Erdkunde im Verhältniss zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen (The Science of the Earth in Relation to Nature and the History of Mankind) between 1817 and 1859.
Thank u for the site and the great work. My first time on and surely not the last.