Weather stops Bristol balloon fiesta early mass ascent A mass ascent of hot air balloons in Bristol was called off earlier because of poor weather conditions. The ascent was due to start the final day of the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta which has been attended by hundreds of thousands of peo...
Jean Cabannes (b. Marseille August 12, 1885 - d. Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer October 31, 1959) was a French physicist specialising in optics. The lunar crater Cabannes was named after him. Read more
Metacomet (ca. 1639 - August 12, 1676), also known as King Philip or Metacom, or occasionally Pometacom, was a war chief or sachem of the Wampanoag Indians and their leader in King Philip's War, a widespread Native American uprising against English colonists in New England. Read more
Vostok 4 (Russian: BcT-4, Orient 4 or East 4) was a mission in the Soviet space program. It was launched on August 12, 1962, a day after Vostok 3 with cosmonaut Pavel Popovich on board - the first time that more than one manned spacecraft were in orbit at the same time. The two Vostok capsules came wit...
The South African government has approved the establishment of the South African Space Agency.
The agency would be an institutional vehicle for the coordination and implementation of South Africa's national space science and technology programs.
"The agency will conduct long-te...
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981. Read more
K-141 Kursk was an Oscar-II class nuclear-powered cruise missile submarine of the Russian Navy, lost with all hands when it sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000. Read more
Joe 4 (Warhead name: RDS-6s (Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Specialnyi; Special Jet Engine)) was an American nickname for the first Soviet test of a thermonuclear weapon on August 12, 1953. It utilised a scheme in which fission and fusion fuel (lithium-6 deuteride) were "layered", a design know...
The first of NASA's three High Energy Astronomy Observatories, HEAO 1, launched August 12, 1977 aboard an Atlas rocket with a Centaur upper stage, operated until 9 January 1979. During that time, it scanned the X-ray sky almost three times over 0.2 keV - 10 MeV, provided nearly constant monitoring o...
Echo I bounces first voices, pictures beyond Earth's curve NASA launched Echo I, the world's first passive communications satellite, from Cape Canaveral on Aug. 12, 1960. "The principal use of the Echo satellite, is in radio communication experiments, in which reflection from the 100 foot...
The 770 - 1700 metre wide asteroid Illapa will make a close pass (37.0 lunar distances, 0.0951 AU), travelling at 28.73 km/second, to the Earth-Moon system on the 12th August, 2012 @ 07:53 UT ±00:01. See moreThe Lunar Distance (LD), the distance between Earth and the Moon, equals 384,401 km, (or 0...
The 220 - 500 metre wide asteroid 2008 RM98 made a close pass (45.5 Lunar Distances, 0.1168 AU) to the Earth-Moon system on the 6th February 2009. See more The Lunar Distance (LD), the distance between Earth and the Moon, equals 384,401 km, (or 0.00256 AU).
The 44 km wide asteroid (234) Barbara (magnitude 13.1) will occult the magnitude 7.5 star HD 53203 in the constellation Monoceros, at 03:24 UT, 21st November, 2009. The star should dim by 5.6 magnitudes for about 8 seconds. The event is visible from Mexico, Florida, Atlantic, Europe and northern R...
The first ascent of the Eiger was made by Swiss guides Christian Almer and Peter Bohren and Irishman Charles Barrington, who climbed the west flank on August 11, 1858. The north face, 1,800 m (German: Nordwand, "north wall"), was first climbed in 1938 by an Austrian-German expedition an...
