Lost in Space? - Don't Know Much About Geography - page 165

It's some kind of lighting effect, but out the window the surface looks much more like light desert
sand than black sand. . . .
1972 Landsat I , the first earth-resources satellite, is launched by the United States.
1972 The U.S. space probe Pioneer 10 is launched. It will become the first human-made object to
leave the solar system.
1973 Pioneer 11 flies by Jupiter and Saturn, and discovers Saturn's eleventh moon and two new
rings.
1973 Three U.S. Skylab missions are made.
1975 In June, Soviet Venera 9 , an orbiter-lander, successfully orbits then lands on Venus, returning
the first surface photo.
1975 In August, the U.S. Viking 1 lands on Mars, the first American landing on another planet; it
returns immense amounts of data. In September, Viking 2 repeats this success. Its search for signs
of life ends with ambiguous results.
1977 American space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are launched on a journey to Jupiter and the
outer planets.
1980 A team led by Walter Alvarez and his father, Luis Walter Alvarez (1911-88), the 1968 Nobel
Prize winner in physics, discovers a thin layer of clay at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) boundary (a
time marked by mass extinction, including the dinosaurs). The clay is enriched with the heavy metal
iridium, a compound common to meteors, leading the team to speculate that a giant body from space
collided with the earth, causing the mass extinction, including that of dinosaurs. Later discoveries
place the most likely point of impact in the Caribbean basin near Yucatán, Mexico.
1981 The first flight of the Columbia , the first space shuttle. The Columbia is relaunched later that
year in the first reuse of a spacecraft.
1983 The second space shuttle, the Challenger , is successfully launched. On a second Challenger
flight that year, Sally K. Ride becomes the first American woman in space. A third Challenger mis-
sion takes the first black astronaut, Guion S. Bluford Jr., into space.
1984 During the Challenger 's fourth flight, two astronauts take the first untethered space walks us-
ing jet-propelled backpacks.
1986 The space shuttle Challenger blows apart seventy-three seconds after launch, killing six astro-
nauts and civilian teacher Christa McAuliffe.
1989 NASA launches Mission to Planet Earth, an international scientific collaboration aimed at im-
proving environmental data measurement.