5 May
1961: On 5 May 1961, America's first astronaut in space, Alan B. Shepard Jr., made a 15-minute sub-orbital flight that reached an altitude of just under 200 kilometres. During the ...
27 FÉVR. 2004
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1986: On 6 May 1986, ESA's Exosat satellite re-entered Earth's atmosphere at the end of its mission.
Exosat stands for European X-ray Observatory Satellite and it was the first ESA mission entirely devoted to study the Universe at X-ray wavelengths. It observed a wide variety of objects, including active galactic nuclei, X-ray binary systems, supernova remnants and clusters of galaxies.
It was launched on 26 May 1983 and placed in an elliptical orbit. Scientists were able to operate the instruments for 76 hours of each revolution.
Exosat's payload consisted of three instruments: two low-energy telescopes, a medium-energy proportional counter and a gas scintillation proportional counter. These detected X-rays in the 0.05 to 50 keV band. Exosat was actively making observations until April 1986 but the natural decay of the orbit caused the satellite to enter the Earth's atmosphere on 6 May of that year.
All the data that Exosat retrieved are still available for study and still leading to new discoveries.
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4 May
1959: On 4 May 1959, ESA astronaut Maurizio Cheli was born. He was a former Lieutenant Colonel in the Italian Air Force, was selected in 1992 by ESA as an ...
3 May
2003: On 3 May 2003, the Mars Express spacecraft was given the final green light for launch following completion of a successful flight-readiness review.ESA had earlier announced that the Mars ...
2 May
1996: On 2 May 1996, five months after its launch, the first SOHO results were presented by a team of scientists at ESA Headquarters in Paris.These first results showed, for ...
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