SPACE.com -- January 2000


	January 2000 posted: 04:33 pm ET 30 January 2000

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A song called "Follow the Drinking Gourd" helped slaves escape northward in pre-Civil War America. The "drinking gourd" was the Big Dipper, visible above the northern horizon.

On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launch.

On January 27, 1967, astronauts Virgil (Gus) Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chafee lost their lives to fire during a preflight test. Their mission was posthumously designated Apollo 1.
Mercury's craters are named after artists and writers. Among them: Cervantes, Ibsen, Nampeyo (a Hopi potter), Dickens, Yeats, and Coleridge.
Alexei Leonov, the first human to walk in space, carried with him a suicide pill that he could have swallowed had he been unable to re-enter the Voskhod 2 spacecraft. He didn't need it, though, and returned safely to Earth after his historic March 1965 space walk.
On January 24, 1986, Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to perform a flyby of Uranus.
Astronomer Edwin Hubble, namesake of the Hubble Space Telescope, was a well-regarded amateur boxer while studying at the University of Chicago.
During a 1974 lunar eclipse, Cambodian soldiers fired guns to scare off what they reportedly thought was a monkey eating the moon. Sixteen people died.

Nikifor Nikitin, an artisan in czarist Russia, was convicted of "seditious talk" for proposing a journey to the moon in 1848. Ironically, he was exiled to the town of Baikonur, in an area now known for the launch facility of that name.

Johann Elert Bode, German astronomer, was born on January 19, 1747. He is best known for popularizing the Titius-Bode rule, which gives approximate distances of planets from the sun.
The three astronauts aboard Apollo 12 were the first (and still only) people to see the sun eclipsed by Earth.
Sir Norman Lockyer (1836-1920), a British astronomer, discovered that the sun contained a previously unknown element, which he named helium.
The Pleiades star cluster is mentioned in various ancient texts, including the biblical Book of Job (38:31): "Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?"
NASA selected its first women astronauts on January 13, 1978.
Nikifor Nikitin, an artisan in czarist Russia, was convicted of "seditious talk" for proposing a journey to the moon in 1848. Ironically, he was exiled to the town of Baikonur, in an area now known for the launch facility of that name.
The orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory was named after the late Indian-born astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. He was often called "Chandra," which means "moon" or "luminous" in Sanskrit.
On January 10, 1946, U.S. Army engineers bounced a radar signal off the moon, the first such contact with a celestial body.
Moon rocks that are stored in a laboratory on Earth are bathed in nitrogen gas to prevent contamination by Earth bacteria.
A run-of-the-mill asteroid, about a kilometer in diameter, contains $150 billion in platinum group metals.
Pluto's average distance to the sun is nearly 40 times greater than the Earth's average distance to the sun.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was the top-grossing science fiction film of the 1990s, earning some $429 million in North America.
In the artificial language Esperanto, the names of the planets are: Merkuro, Venuso, Tero, Marso, Jupitero, Saturno, Urano, Neptuno, and Plutono.

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