Juno arrives at Jupiter
NASA’s Juno space probe successfully pulls of a risky orbital insertion maneuver, slowing itself down just enough to be captured into an unprecedented polar orbit around Jupiter. Launched in 2011, Juno’s first close pass of Jupiter brings it within 3,100 miles of Jupiter’s cloudtops, the closest any spacecraft has ever approached the huge planet. Its polar orbit will allow it to reduces its exposure to Jupiter’s intense magnetic field, which is powerful enough in the planet’s equatorial regions to damage or destroy on-board electronics. Juno’s mission is expected to last 20 months.
New Horizons’ last-minute scare
NASA’s New Horizons abruptly loses contact with Earth-based ground controllers and then signals that it has gone into safe mode, ten days before its closest flyby of Pluto. In this mode, the spacecraft gathers no scientific data, and awaits intervention from Earth, but its distance from Earth – four billion miles away – means that signals transmitted to or from New Horizons take four and a half hours to reach their destination (and any reply takes just as long). A timing error is located in New Horizons’ automatic event sequencer, a vital part of its mission since it will need to operate independently to conduct hundreds of observations of Pluto and its satellites with no contact from Earth until later, and the probe is rebooted within 48 hours. Though the probe’s automatic switch to failsafe mode has cost the mission some scientific observations, most of the high-value data will not be collected until within 24 hours of closest approach on July 14th.
STS-121
NASA launches Space Shuttle Discovery for the first time in nearly a year for a second “Return to Flight” mission to the International Space Station, testing more safety procedures and new materials developed since the July 2005 flight (which still required repairs to be conducted in orbit). Aboard Discovery are Commander Steven Lindsey, Pilot Mark Kelly, and mission specialists Stephanie Wilson, Michael Fossum, Piers Sellers, Thomas Reiter and Lisa Nowak. Reiter remains aboard the station, bumping its crew up to three people for the first time since 2003.
Colliding with Deep Impact
After months on a precise interception course, NASA’s unmanned Deep Impact space probe meets up with Comet Tempel 1, firing a impactor into the comet’s nucleus to study the distribution and composition of the debris scattered by the resulting impact. The impactor had been released by the flyby spacecraft six days earlier, and transmitted its images and readings to the flyby vehicle, which records them and retransmits them to ground controllers on Earth. The two vehicles’ on-board software tracks the comet so precisely that the impact happens within a second of the anticipated timeline in the mission plan, kicking up enough cometary dust to obscure the view of the crater left on the comet’s nucleus. Following the Tempel 1 mission, the still-intact Deep Impact flyby vehicle is redirected for future missions to other objects in the solar system.
Pathfinder bounces onto Mars
Using a never-before-attempted system of landing, the Mars Pathfinder unmanned probe employs an aerobraking maneuver to slow down in the planet’s atmosphere, and an all-encompassing layer of airbags to “bounce” onto the surface without using rockets to slow the vehicle down. The weighted landing station rolls to the correct orientation, deflates the airbags, and deploys on schedule, proving the merits of a landing technique that will deliver future Mars landers already in the planning stages.
Hammer House Of Mystery And Suspense: And The Wall Came Tumbling Down
The 13th and final episode of the Hammer Studios-produced horror anthology series Hammer House Of Mystery And Suspense airs on ITV; the series will be shown later in the U.S. under the title Fox Mystery Theatre. Barbi Benton, Gareth Hunt (The New Avengers), and Peter Wyngarde (Flash Gordon, Department S) guest star.
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“The test flights are over”
Space Shuttle Columbia lands at Edwards Air Force Base in California, making its first-ever landing on a concrete runway. After greeting the returning astronauts and inspecting the shuttle, President Ronald Reagan – with the partially-dismantled prototype Enterprise as a backdrop – declares NASA’s Space Shuttle system fully operational, saying “the test flights are over.” Columbia Commander Ken Mattingly later reveals that there was tremendous pressure on NASA to land Columbia on Independence Day, regardless of how many mission objectives had been met, to maximize the publicity value of the President’s speech. But the quick turnaround time and almost-weekly flight schedule that NASA had publicized throughout the 1970s is already a pipe dream: post-mission the four missions flown so far prove that post-landing servicing of each orbiter takes longer than expected. Columbia won’t fly again until the first “operational” mission in November.
Tales Of The Unexpected: Light Fingers
ITV airs the 62nd episode of the anthology series Tales Of The Unexpected. Tom Bosley (Happy Days), Janet Leigh (Psycho), and Frank Sinatra Jr. guest star.
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Tales Of The Unexpected now streaming on Amazon Prime
The Stranger: Episode 9
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation airs the ninth episode of the science fiction series The Stranger, starring Ron Haddrick. This episode features scenes filmed on location at the Parkes Radio Telescope.
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One Step Beyond: Eyewitness
ABC airs the 97th and final episode of the supernatural anthology series One Step Beyond, hosted and directed by John Newland. John Meillon and Anton Rodgers guest star. Though this is the last episode of the venerable series, the name and format – and even some episode scripts – will be revived for a follow-up series, The Next Step Beyond, in the 1970s, also hosted by Newland.
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One Step Beyond now streaming on Amazon Prime
Tales Of Tomorrow: The Duplicates
The 40th episode of ABC’s science fiction anthology series, Tales Of Tomorrow, airs on ABC, with each episode’s opening titles proclaiming that the series is produced “in cooperation with the Science-Fiction League of America”, a collective of sci-fi writers including Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon among its members. This episode stars Darren McGavin (Kolchak: The Night Stalker).
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