September 14

Around the Moon and Back

1968 — Zond 5 Begins a Historic Journey

21:42:10 UTC

On September 14, 1968, at approximately 21:42:10 UTC, the Soviet Union launched Zond 5 from Site 81 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Proton-K rocket. The spacecraft was placed first into Earth orbit and then sent toward the Moon on a free-return trajectory.

Zond 5 was a version of the Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft being developed as part of the Soviet effort to send cosmonauts around the Moon. No people were aboard this flight, but the spacecraft carried an unusual collection of living passengers—including two Russian steppe tortoises, along with insects, plants, microorganisms, and other biological specimens. Scientists hoped to learn more about how living organisms would respond to a journey beyond Earth's immediate environment.

Four days later, on September 18, Zond 5 swept around the Moon, passing approximately 1,950 kilometers (1,210 miles) above its surface. The spacecraft then headed back toward Earth. On September 21, it reentered Earth's atmosphere and splashed down in the Indian Ocean, where Soviet recovery vessels retrieved it. The tortoises and other biological specimens survived the journey.

The mission achieved an extraordinary milestone: living creatures from Earth had traveled around the Moon and returned safely. It also demonstrated important technologies required for human lunar missions, including navigation across hundreds of thousands of kilometers and high-speed atmospheric reentry after returning from the Moon.

The timing was particularly significant. Only three months later, in December 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders would become the first humans to travel around the Moon.

Why It Matters: Zond 5 demonstrated that a spacecraft could travel from Earth, pass around the Moon, and return living passengers safely to Earth. It represented an important technological bridge between robotic lunar exploration and human voyages to the Moon.

 

Also on This Day

1712 — Giovanni Domenico Cassini Dies

Time unknown

On September 14, 1712, the influential Italian-born French astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini died in Paris.

Cassini was one of the outstanding observational astronomers of the seventeenth century. Among his achievements, he discovered four moons of Saturn—Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys, and Dione—and identified the prominent division between Saturn's A and B rings that still bears his name: the Cassini Division.

He also made important observations of Jupiter and Mars and contributed to efforts to determine the scale of the solar system.

Centuries later, his name would travel to Saturn aboard the Cassini spacecraft, the NASA-European Space Agency-Italian Space Agency mission that entered orbit around Saturn in 2004 and transformed our knowledge of the planet, its rings, and its remarkable family of moons.

Why It Matters: Cassini helped establish planetary astronomy as the careful study of other worlds as physical places with measurable characteristics. His discoveries remain part of the language of astronomy more than three centuries after his death.

1926 — J. L. E. Dreyer Dies

Time unknown

On September 14, 1926, Danish-born astronomer Johan Ludvig Emil Dreyer, usually known as J. L. E. Dreyer, died in Oxford, England, at age 74.

Dreyer's most enduring contribution was the New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, published in 1888 and universally known as the NGC. The catalogue contained 7,840 objects, with thousands more subsequently included in Dreyer's supplementary Index Catalogues.

His system remains part of the working vocabulary of astronomy. Familiar objects continue to be identified by their NGC numbers: the Andromeda Galaxy is NGC 224, the Orion Nebula is NGC 1976, and the Whirlpool Galaxy is NGC 5194.

Dreyer was also an important historian of astronomy. He wrote about the development of astronomical thought and devoted considerable scholarly attention to the life and observations of Tycho Brahe.

Why It Matters: Dreyer helped organize the deep sky. His catalogues gave generations of astronomers a common system for identifying thousands of objects beyond the solar system—a system that remains in widespread use today.

1958 — Mohr Sounding Rockets Reach the Upper Atmosphere

Time unknown

On September 14, 1958, three experimental sounding rockets designed by German engineer Ernst Mohr were successfully launched near Cuxhaven, West Germany. Their dart-like payloads reached an altitude of approximately 50 kilometers (31 miles).

The achievement followed unsuccessful launch attempts in June. Mohr's single-stage, solid-fueled rocket accelerated a narrow payload dart that separated after burnout and continued upward because of its more efficient aerodynamic shape. The successful September flights reached their intended altitude.

Fifty kilometers is below the 100-kilometer Kármán line commonly used to define the boundary of space, but sounding rockets occupy an important place in the history of space science. They allow instruments to investigate portions of Earth's atmosphere that are too high for balloons while avoiding the complexity and expense of placing a spacecraft into orbit.

Why It Matters: Mohr's experiments formed part of the postwar development of sounding-rocket technology—an important scientific tool for studying Earth's upper atmosphere and the environment approaching space.

 

The Bigger Picture

September 14 brings together three stages in humanity's effort to understand and eventually travel beyond Earth.

Cassini represents observation. With increasingly capable telescopes, astronomers discovered that the planets were not simply wandering points of light but complex worlds surrounded by rings and moons.

Dreyer represents organization. As telescopes revealed thousands of objects beyond the solar system, astronomy required systematic catalogues so that scientists could identify, compare, and communicate what they observed.

The sounding rockets of 1958 represent experimentation beyond the ground. Astronomical and atmospheric instruments increasingly could be carried above the dense lower atmosphere.

And Zond 5 represents exploration. Only ten years after the Mohr rocket experiments reached 50 kilometers above Earth, another spacecraft departed Earth altogether and began a journey of hundreds of thousands of kilometers around the Moon and back.

The progression captures much of the story at the heart of On This Day in Astronomy and Space: humanity observed the heavens, learned to map and understand them, developed machines capable of rising above Earth, and eventually began sending those machines to other worlds.

At a Glance

1712 — Time unknown — Giovanni Domenico Cassini, pioneering observer of Saturn and its moons, dies in Paris.

1926 — Time unknown — J. L. E. Dreyer, compiler of the New General Catalogue (NGC), dies in Oxford.

1958 — Time unknown — Ernst Mohr's experimental sounding rockets successfully reach approximately 50 kilometers above West Germany.

1968 — 21:42:10 UTC — Zond 5 launches from Baikonur on the historic mission that will carry living organisms around the Moon and safely back to Earth.

September 13

 Humanity Reaches Another World

1959 — Luna 2 Reaches the Moon

22:02:04 UTC

On September 13, 1959, at approximately 22:02:04 UTC, the Soviet spacecraft Luna 2 struck the Moon, becoming the first human-made object to reach the surface of another celestial body.

Launched from the Soviet Union the previous day, Luna 2 was placed on a direct trajectory toward the Moon. After traveling through space for roughly a day and a half, the spacecraft impacted the lunar surface in the region between Mare Imbrium and Mare Serenitatis, near the crater Autolycus. NASA places the impact roughly 160 miles from the site where Apollo 15 astronauts would land twelve years later.

Luna 2 was not merely intended to demonstrate that the Moon could be reached. The spacecraft carried scientific instruments for investigating cosmic rays, radiation, magnetic fields, and the space environment. Its measurements found no significant lunar magnetic field or radiation belts comparable to Earth's. The spacecraft also carried metallic spheres bearing Soviet emblems, which were intended to scatter upon impact.

The achievement came less than two years after Sputnik 1 inaugurated the Space Age. Sputnik demonstrated that humans could place an artificial object into orbit around Earth. Luna 2 crossed another threshold: something built by human hands had now traveled from Earth to another world.

Why It Matters: Luna 2 transformed reaching another celestial body from an aspiration into an accomplished fact. Every successful planetary landing and impact mission that followed—from the Moon and Mars to asteroids and comets—belongs to a history whose first physical contact with another world occurred on September 13, 1959.

 

Also on This Day

1850 — John Russell Hind Discovers 12 Victoria

Time unknown

On the evening of September 13, 1850, English astronomer John Russell Hind discovered the asteroid 12 Victoria while observing at George Bishop's Observatory in London.

Hind was comparing his observations in the constellation Pegasus with a recently prepared star chart when he noticed an object that did not belong among the mapped stars. He correctly recognized it as a previously unknown member of the solar system.

Victoria was only the twelfth asteroid known to astronomy. When the first asteroid, Ceres, had been discovered in 1801, astronomers had no idea that the region between Mars and Jupiter contained a vast population of small worlds. Discoveries such as Victoria gradually revealed the true nature of what we now call the asteroid belt.

The asteroid's name produced an interesting nineteenth-century controversy. Officially, Hind named it for Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, but the name also honored Britain's reigning Queen Victoria. Some American astronomers objected because the developing convention discouraged naming asteroids after living people, and the alternative name Clio appeared for a time in American publications.

Hind eventually discovered ten asteroids, becoming one of the most successful asteroid hunters of his generation.

Why It Matters: The discovery of Victoria was part of a profound change in humanity's picture of the solar system. What had once seemed to consist principally of the Sun, planets, and their moons was increasingly understood to contain a much larger and more diverse population of smaller worlds.

1985 — An F-15 Destroys a Satellite in Orbit

Time not established

On September 13, 1985, U.S. Air Force Major Wilbert D. “Doug” Pearson climbed rapidly in a specially modified F-15A Eagle and launched an ASM-135A anti-satellite missile toward an object hundreds of kilometers above him.

The target was Solwind P78-1, an aging scientific satellite that had been used to study the Sun. The missile released a miniature kinetic-kill vehicle that homed in on the satellite and destroyed it through a high-speed collision. The test marked the first—and ultimately only—time the ASM-135 system destroyed an actual satellite in orbit.

The achievement demonstrated something technologically extraordinary and strategically troubling: a weapon carried by an aircraft in Earth's atmosphere could successfully strike an object traveling at orbital velocity high above the planet.

The test also illustrated another danger. Destroying a satellite at orbital velocity created a cloud of debris. Such fragments can remain in orbit and pose collision hazards to other spacecraft, making destructive anti-satellite testing an enduring concern in the increasingly crowded environment around Earth.

Why It Matters: The 1985 test demonstrated that space had become more than a realm of scientific discovery and peaceful exploration. It had also become strategically important enough to be treated as a potential arena of military conflict—and showed that actions in space could leave consequences long after an individual mission ended.

 

The Bigger Picture

September 13 presents three remarkably different moments in humanity's changing relationship with the universe.

In 1850, John Russell Hind stood at a telescope and discovered another small world orbiting the Sun. Astronomy was still fundamentally an activity conducted from Earth: humans looked outward and gradually learned what populated the heavens.

In 1959, that relationship changed. Luna 2 did something no telescope could do. Humanity sent a machine across the gulf between Earth and Moon and physically touched another celestial body for the first time.

By 1985, human activity had expanded into near-Earth space so extensively that satellites had become important not only for science and communication but also for national security—and nations were developing technologies capable of destroying them.

These events reveal both the promise and the responsibility that accompany technological progress. We discovered other worlds, learned how to reach beyond our own, and eventually confronted the consequences of bringing human competition into space with us.

September 13 therefore tells more than a story of technological advancement. It reminds us that our increasing ability to reach the universe also raises an enduring question: What will humanity choose to do with the power to operate there?

At a Glance

1850 — Time unknown — John Russell Hind discovers asteroid 12 Victoria at George Bishop's Observatory in London.

1959 — 22:02:04 UTC — Luna 2 impacts the Moon, becoming the first human-made object to reach another celestial body.

1985 — Time not established — An ASM-135A missile launched from an F-15 destroys the Solwind P78-1 satellite, the first satellite destroyed by a weapon launched from an aircraft.