NASA Success Story Celebrates Silver Anniversary

Tomorrow marks the 25th year of Hubble Space Telescope operations. It has provided hundreds of thousands of images, identified quasars, discovered dark matter, and engaged in edge of the universe determination plus lots more. One of NASA’s most successful and long-lasting missions.

The first photo of the moon was taken on this date 175 years ago: 1840 by John William Draper, an 1836 graduate of Penn’s Medical school. He had perfected Louis Daguerre’s photo process in order to take the first clear pictures of people in 1839. His son, Henry and a granddaughter Antonia Maury, became astronomers. Henry took the first photo of the Orion nebula in 1880.

Werner von Braun born 105 years ago today. Engineer and architect of the enormously powerful Saturn V rocket system that took humans to the moon in the late 60’s-early 70’s. Saturn had a flawless performance record. Von Braun also worked on the V-2 rocket system that terrorized London during WWII. When allies seized the production facility where he supervised V-2 construction, he was captured and brought to the US where he began work developing rocket technology for the Army.
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