Pioneer 10, the world’s first outer-planetary probe,was
launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to
Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet, on this day
in 1972.

In December 1973, after successfully negotiating the
asteroid belt and a distance of 620 million miles,
Pioneer 10 reached Jupiter and sent back to Earth
the first close-up images of the spectacular gas giant.

In June 1983, the NASA spacecraft left the solar system
and the next day radioed back the first scientific data on
interstellar space. NASA officially ended the Pioneer 10
project on March 31, 1997, with the spacecraft having
traveled a distance of some six billion miles.

New images released this week from NASA’s James Webb
Space Telescope are revealing Neptune, and the planet’s
hard-to-detect rings, in a fresh light.

Johann Gottfried Galle
(9 June 1812 – 10 July 1910)

(Fox News) – NASA on Thursday shared an image taken by the
James Webb Telescope showing the first-ever direct image of
a planet outside our solar system. 

NASA says the exoplanet, HIP 65426 b, is a gas giant, meaning
it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable. The image
can be seen through different bands of infrared light.

Sasha Hinkley, associate professor of physics and astronomy
at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, who led the observations, called the images a "transformative moment, not
only for Webb but also for astronomy generally." 

The James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on 25 December
2021 on an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, and
arrived at the Sun–Earth L₂ Lagrange point in January 2022.

The telescope is the successor of the Hubble as NASA’s flagship
mission in astrophysics.

German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle discovered the
planet Neptune at the Berlin Observatory.

Neptune, generally the eighth planet from the sun, was
postulated by the French astronomer Urbain-Jean-Joseph
Le Verrier, who calculated the approximate location of the
planet by studying gravity-induced disturbances in the
motions of Uranus. On September 23, 1846, Le Verrier
informed Galle of his findings, and the same night Galle
and his assistant Heinrich Louis d’Arrest identified
Neptune at their observatory in Berlin. Noting its movement
relative to background stars over 24 hours confirmed that it
was a planet.

The blue gas giant, which has a diameter four times that of
Earth, was named for the Roman god of the sea. It has eight
known moons, of which Triton is the largest, and a ring
system containing three bright and two dim rings. It completes
an orbit of the sun once every 165 years. In 1989, the U.S.
planetary spacecraft Voyager 2 was the first human
spacecraft to visit Neptune.

1838 painting of the New Berlin Observatory.

Johann Gottfried Galle
(June 9, 1812 – July 10, 1910)

CAMILLE BOHANNON