If we ask you what’s so special about October, you will probably say “Halloween”. Although we too love spooky decorations, toffee apples and trick-or-treaters’ tireless knocking on the door after dusk, there is more this month to remember and celebrate. Here is October in historic space dates, famous astronomers’ and astronauts’ birthdays and upcoming events. Happy October!

1. October in space dates

2. October 3
(1935) Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke is born.
Charles Duke is a retired American astronaut and
pilot. He was a Lunar Module Pilot on the Apollo 16
mission. Duke spent over 3 days on the Moon and
completed 3 EVAs that lasted over 20 hours in total.
He also served as CAPCOM (spaceflight
communicator) for the historic Apollo 11 mission.
October 4
(1957) Soviet Union launches the first man-made
satellite Sputnik 1. This event marks the beginning
of the Space Race between the US and USSR.
Sputnik 1 was a very simple spherical satellite. It
orbited the Earth once every 1,5 hours and
transmitted a radio signal (the iconic beep-beep) for
three weeks until its batteries died. Sputnik 1
reentered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned up
three months after the launch.

3. October 5
(1882) American rocket engineer Robert H. Goddard is born.
Goddard (1882-1945) was the first to design and test a rocket that used
liquid propellant, in that case gasoline and liquid oxygen. Although
Goddard’s rocket was nowhere near space, in fact it barely rose to the
height of a two storey house, it successfully demonstrated the possibility
of using liquid propellant in rockets. Goddard developed the theory of
rocket flight, worked on a multistage rocket and patented well over 200
inventions over the course of his life. NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center was named in his honour. Read more about Robert H.
Goddard here.
October 9
(1873 ) German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild is born.
Schwarzschild (1873-1916) gave the first exact solution to Einstein’s
field equations for the case of non-rotating spherically symmetrical
mass. The solution, known as Schwarzschild metric, determined
something called Schwarzschild radius. An object packed within a
sphere the size of its Schwarzschild radius will collapse to form a black
hole. Interestingly, Schwarzschild himself didn’t think that black hole
were real objects.

4. October 10
(1967) Outer Space treaty comes into force.
Outer Space Treaty is a document that provides basic guidelines for the
peaceful use of Space. It states, among other things, that there can be no
weapons of mass destruction in the Earth’s orbit and no military activities
on the Moon and other celestial objects. Over 100 countries are party to
this treaty and many others have signed but not yet ratified it.
October 11
(1758) German astronomer Heinrich Willhelm Olbers is born.
A doctor by day and a stargazer by night, Olbers (1758-1840) is the
discoverer of the asteroids 2 Pallas and 4 Vesta as well as a number of
comets. In the paper Olbers wrote in the 1820s he investigated the
question why the sky is dark at night. He proposed that the interstellar
medium absorbs the light from distant stars (and therefore our night sky is
dark instead of being lit by the light of billions of distant stars). Although his
conclusion was wrong, the question he raised became known as Olbers’
paradox, or the night sky paradox. You will find an excellent paper on
Olbers’ paradox here.

5. October 12
(2019) WonderDome mobile planetarium runs family space shows
at Morley Town Hall as part of the Morley Art Festival.
October 15
(2003) China becomes the 3rd nation after the USSR and USA to
send an astronaut into space.
Zhenzhou 5 was the first crewed mission of the China National
Space Administration. It was launched atop Chinese Long March
2F rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in Gobi Desert.
The spacecraft carried one taikonaut (that’s what Chinese
astronauts are called), Yang Liwei, into orbit. Liwei spent over 20
hours in Space and completed 14 orbits around the Earth.

6. October 18
(1989) Galileo spacecraft is launched aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis.
Galileo was NASA mission to study Jupiter and its moons. For almost 8 years the spacecraft
explored Jupiter’s rings, atmosphere, magnetosphere as well as the planet’s biggest moons,
Europa, Io, Ganymede and Callisto. Galileo discovered, among other things, volcanoes on
Io, magnetic field around Ganymede and water on Europa. The spacecraft also carried a
small Galileo Probe. The probe was deployed and sent on a one-way trip into Jupiter’s
atmosphere. At the end of the mission in September 2003, after completing 35 orbits around
the gas giant, Galileo probe itself was sent on a crash course into Jupiter.
October 19
(1910) American-Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) is born.
Chandrasekhar made a massive contribution to the theory of stellar evolution. He calculated
the “Chandrasekhar limit”, the critical mass of a supernova remnant. A remnant with a mass
up to the limit will remain a white dwarf whereas a heavier one will continue to collapse and
become either a neutron star or a black hole. Chandrasekhar received a Nobel Prize in
Physics in 1983. You can learn more about the scientist and his discoveries in our blog
post Great astronomers of the 20th century: Chandrasekhar.

7. October 20
British aerospace scientist Kenneth Gatland is born.
Gatland (1924-1997) is the author and editor of many books and
articles about space and spaceflight including “The illustrated
Encyclopedia of Space Technology: A Comprehensive History of
Space Exploration”. Gatland was president of the British
Interplanetary Society in 1973-1977.
October 22
American radio engineer Karl Jansky is born.
Jansky (1905-1950) was a radio engineer at Bell Labs. While he
looked for sources of radio static that could potentially interfere
with transatlantic transmission, Jansky found a new type of signal.
It turned out he discovered radio waves from the Milky Way!

8. October 25
(1945) American astrophysicist, particle physicist and
cosmologist David Schramm is born.
Schramm (1945-1997) was the World leading expert on the
Big Bang theory. He is well known for studying how the lightest
elements were formed after the Big Bang. He also calculated
how much regular matter there is in the Universe and predicted
the existence of “dark matter”.
October 27
(2019) Daylight Saving Time ends.
Every year on the last Sunday of October at 2AM we set the
clock 1 hour back. From that moment until the end of March
(when British Summer TIme, or BST, begins) UK is
on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

9. October 29
(2018) Parker Solar Probe sets a new record.
Launched on August 12, 2018, Parker Solar Probe is a NASA mission to study the
solar atmosphere and solar wind. On October 29, 2018 Parker Probe became the
closest man-made object to the Sun. And it keeps getting closer with every orbit! You
can learn all about Parker mission in our blog post Parker Probe: the mission to solve
the mystery of the Sun.
October 30
(2018) End of the Kepler Space Telescope mission.
Kepler telescope was a NASA mission to search for planets orbiting other stars. It was
launched in March 2009. During the 9.5 year long mission Kepler discovered nearly
3000 exoplanets. On October 30, 2018 the planet hunter ran out of fuel and NASA
announced the end of the programme. The spacecraft remains in orbit.
One of the exoplanets discovered by Kepler, planet K2-18b, made the headlines last
month when astronomers found water vapor in its atmosphere.

10. October 31
(1930) American astronaut Michael Collins
is born.
Michael Collins is a retired astronaut and
test pilot. He is most famous for being “the
second man on the Moon” as a Command
Module Pilot on Apollo 11 mission. Three
years prior to Apollo 11, Collins served
as Gemini 10 pilot. During Gemini flight he
spent 3 days in orbit and completed
2 EVAs. Michael Collins was one of the
CAPCOMs for the Apollo 8 mission.