Space Timeline

1. SpaceTimeline Jared Mardenborough Dane DeBrunner Weiming Zhao

2. Nicolaus Copernicus • Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was a mathematician and astronomer who proposed that the sun was stationary in the center of the universe and the earth revolved around it. •  Disturbed by the failure of Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe to follow Aristotle's requirement for the uniform circular motion of all celestial bodies and determined to eliminate Ptolemy's equal, Copernicus decided that he could achieve his goal only through a heliocentric model.  • He thereby created a concept of a universe in which the distances of the planets from the sun bore a direct relationship to the size of their orbits.  • At the time Copernicus's heliocentric idea was very controversial; nevertheless, it was the start of a change in the way the world was viewed, and Copernicus came to be seen as the initiator of the Scientific Revolution.

3. Galileo Galilei is normally credited with the usage of the telescope to observe objects in space. He also discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter, named the Galilean moons. This was the bases for Galileo's reasoning for a heliocentric solar system. His study of the the Moon led him to believe the Moon had seas and life. That's why most of the lunar features is named by seas (i.e. Sea of Tranquility). Galileo Galilei

4. Tycho Brahe, born TygeOttesen Brahe born on December 14, 1546, was a Danish nobleman known for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical and planetary observations. Coming from Scania, then part of Denmark, now part of modern-day Sweden, Brahe was well known in his lifetime as an astronomer and alchemist.  Tycho Brahe was granted an estate on the island of Hven and the funding to build the Uraniborg, an early research institute, where he built large astronomical instruments and took many careful measurements. After disagreements with the new king in 1597, he was invited by the Czech king and Holy Roman emperor Rudolph II to Prague, where he became the official imperial astronomer. He built the new observatory at BenátkynadJizerou. Here, from 1600 until his death in 1601, he was assisted by Johannes Kepler. Kepler would later use Tycho's astronomical information to develop his own theories of astronomy.  As an astronomer, Tycho worked to combine what he saw as the geometrical benefits of the Copernican system with the philosophical benefits of the Ptolemaic system into his own model of the universe, the Tychonic system. He is generally referred to as "Tycho" rather than by his surname "Brahe", as was common in Scandinavia at the time. Tycho Brahe

5. Johannes Kepler Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician and astronomer who discovered that the Earth and planets travel about the sun in elliptical orbits. He gave three fundamental laws of planetary motion. He also did important work in optics and geometry.

6. Kepler's Laws • The first law states that the shape of each planet's orbit is an ellipse with the sun at one focus. The sun is thus off-center in the ellipse and the planet's distance from the sun varies as the planet moves through one orbit. The second law specifies quantitatively how the speed of a planet increases as its distance from the sun decreases. If an imaginary line is drawn from the sun to the planet, the line will sweep out areas in space that are shaped like pie slices.  • The second law states that the area swept out in equal periods of time is the same at all points in the orbit. When the planet is far from the sun and moving slowly, the pie slice will be long and narrow; when the planet is near the sun and moving fast, the pie slice will be short and fat.  • The third law establishes a relation between the average distance of the planet from the sun (the semimajor axis of the ellipse) and the time to complete one revolution around the sun (the period): the ratio of the cube of the semimajor axis to the square of the period is the same for all the planets including the earth.

7. Edwin Hubble Edwin Hubble was born in  Marshfield, Missouri on November 29,1889. Hubble observed galaxies and sorted them by content, distance, shape, and brightness,and was able to formulate Hubble's Law in 1929. This helped astronomers determine the age of the universe, and proving that the universe was expanding. This allowed Einstein to confirm his original General Theory of Relativity stating that the universe is curved by gravity., therefore the universe can contract and expand.

8. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union sent into orbit Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite in history. Then a month later, an even larger and heavier satellite, Sputnik 2, carried the dog Laika into orbit. Sputnik's milestone was that it was the first artificial satellite ever. Спутник

9. Project Mercury began in 1958,  about a year after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1. This was the United States' first manned space program. The objective of the program was mainly to get the basics of space flight so we could beat the Soviet Union to the Moon. However, three weeks after Alan Shepard's first U.S. human suborbital flight, on May 5, 1961, and with only 15 minutes of U.S. space flight experience, President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Project Mercury was American's first "small steps" toward that "Giant Leap for mankind." Mercury Missions

10. The Gemini program was created in 1965 for the purpose of teaching astronauts the techniques involved in docking, rendezvous, long-term flight and space-walks.There have been 12 missions so far. Gemini

11. Apollo 11 was the first manned mission to land on the Moon. The first steps by humans on another planetary body were taken by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on July 20, 1969. The astronauts also returned to Earth the first samples from another planetary body. Apollo 11 achieved its primary mission - to perform a manned lunar landing and return the mission safely to Earth - and paved the way for the Apollo lunar landing missions to follow. APOLLO XI

12. Apollo 13, launched on April 11, 1970, was NASA's third manned mission to the moon. Two days later on April 13 while the mission was en route to the moon, a fault in the electrical system of one of the Service Module's oxygen tanks produced an explosion that caused both oxygen tanks to fail and also led to a loss of electrical power. The command module remained functional on its own batteries and oxygen tank, but these were usable only during the last hours of the mission. The crew shut down the Command Module and used the Lunar Module as a "lifeboat" during the return trip to earth. Despite great hardship caused by limited power, loss of cabin heat, and a shortage of potable water, the crew returned to Earth, and the mission was termed a "successful failure." APOLLO XIII

13. Mars Rover The Mars Exploration Rover mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term project of robotic exploration of Mars. There are 2 rovers that were  launched in  2003 named Spirit and

14. As of April 14, 2009, there has been 125 NASA Space Shuttle Launches. There has be several space shuttles: Enterprise,Columbia,Challenger,Discovery,Atlantis, and Endeavour. Due to the reusable nature of the shuttles, all the missions could be executed with a relatively lower cost. The space shuttle is a very unique vehicle; it launches like a rocket (with the help of 2 solid rocket boosters) and lands like a plane. Other than Columbia and Challenger, the space shuttles proved to be a very reliable way of transportation to space .NASA plans the retirement of the shuttle to be somewhere in the vicinity of 2010. The Space Shuttle

15. Hubble Space Telescope Launched on April 25,1990, the HST is one of NASA's most successful and long-lasting science missions. Even today, it is still functional. It revolves the Earth every 97 minutes, which is equivalent to 8 km/sec. It has changed the way scientists have looked at the universe. The HST solved the atmospheric distortion problem to telescopes in space. It proved to have remarkable clarity that allowed scientists to see the universe in unparalleled detail. Unfortunately, this wonderful telescope will slowly be degraded to the point that it stops functioning, but luckily, the James Webb Telescope will soon succeed the HST.

16. THE END A not so long time ago… In a school, pretty close to here… Three students made the greatest powerpoint… EVER!!! They doubted their abilities, thought their skills werent good enough… They were wrong. Dane Debrunner, master of Gemini, crafter of Sputnik, and king of the Red Planet. Weiming Zhao,