The government of the Netherlands turned down both applications because of the counterclaims. Also, officials said the device was easy to reproduce, making it difficult to patent. In the end, Metius got a small reward, but the government paid Lippershey a handsome fee to make copies of his telescope. In , Galileo Galilei heard about the "Dutch perspective glasses" and within days had designed one of his own — without ever seeing one.
He made some improvements — his could magnify objects 20 times — and presented his device to the Venetian Senate. Galileo was the first to point a telescope skyward. He was able to make out mountains and craters on the moon, as well as a ribbon of diffuse light arching across the sky — the Milky Way. He also discovered the rings of Saturn, sunspots and four of Jupiter's moons. Thomas Harriot, a British ethnographer and mathematician, also used a spyglass to observe the moon.
Harriot became famous for his travels to the early settlements in Virginia to detail resources there. His August drawings of the moon predate Galileo's, but were never published.
The more Galileo looked, the more he was convinced of the sun-centered Copernican model of the planets. But his ideas were considered heretical, and Galileo was called to appear before the inquisition in Rome in He struck a plea bargain and was sentenced to house arrest, where he continued to work and write until his death in Elsewhere in Europe, scientists began improving the telescope.
Johannes Kepler studied the optics and designed a telescope with two convex lenses, which made the images appear upside down. Working from Kepler's writings, Isaac Newton reasoned it was better to make a telescope out of mirrors rather than lenses and built a reflecting telescope in Centuries later the reflecting telescope would dominate astronomy.
The largest refracting telescope one that use lenses to gather and focus light opened at Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, in But the inch 1 meter glass lens at Yerkes was soon made obsolete by larger mirrors. The Hooker inch 2. It was there that the astronomer Edwin Hubble determined that the Andromeda Nebula was indeed as some astronomers had argued a galaxy far, far away 2.
With the development of the radio, scientists could start to study not just light, but other electromagnetic radiation in space. Explorer carried several instruments into space for conducting science experiments. One instrument was a Geiger counter for detecting cosmic rays. This was for an experiment operated by researcher James Van Allen, which, together with measurements from later satellites, proved the existence of what are now called the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth.
The first human in space was the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who made one orbit around Earth on April 12, , on a flight that lasted minutes. A little more than three weeks later, NASA launched astronaut Alan Shepard into space, not on an orbital flight, but on a suborbital trajectory—a flight that goes into space but does not go all the way around Earth.
Three weeks later, on May 25, President John F. These milestones included Luna 2, which became the first human-made object to hit the Moon in Soon after that, the U.
The U. Project Gemini was followed by Project Apollo, which took astronauts into orbit around the moon and to the lunar surface between and In , on Apollo 11, the United States sent the first astronauts to the Moon, and Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on its surface. During the landed missions, astronauts collected samples of rocks and lunar dust that scientists still study to learn about the moon.
Space stations marked the next phase of space exploration. The first space station in Earth orbit was the Soviet Salyut 1 station, which was launched in During the s, NASA also carried out Project Viking in which two probes landed on Mars, took numerous photographs, examined the chemistry of the Martian surface environment, and tested the Martian dirt called regolith for the presence of microorganisms.
Since the Apollo lunar program ended in , human space exploration has been limited to low-Earth orbit, where many countries participate and conduct research on the International Space Station. However, unpiloted probes have traveled throughout our solar system.
In recent years, probes have made a range of discoveries, including that a moon of Jupiter, called Europa, and a moon of Saturn, called Enceladus, have oceans under their surface ice that scientists think may harbor life. Meanwhile, instruments in space, such as the Kepler Space Telescope , and instruments on the ground have discovered thousands of exoplanets, planets orbiting other stars. This era of exoplanet discovery began in , and advanced technology now allows instruments in space to characterize the atmospheres of some of these exoplanets.
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Latest book. Work in the Age of Data. Science Leading Figures. Estimated reading time Time 4 to read. A calling to fly Emilio Herrera was born in Granada in into a bourgeois family. Herrera was trained in the army, where he reached the rank of General of the Air Forces. The space suit, 30 years before its time Having returned to Spain, Herrera set off on what was his most ambitious project: to reach the stratosphere in a balloon for the purposes of research and investigation.
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