Since the ESA’s inception, this organization has executed a number of missions and programs aimed at furthering space exploration and development. Some of these missions were independent ESA pursuits.

This week in 1934, Soviet Air Force pilot and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino near Gzhatsk, a town later renamed after him, in the Russian SSR.

The European Space Agency (ESA) was founded in 1975 from the merger of the European Launcher Development Organization (ELDO) and the European Space Research Organization (ESRO).

The NASA Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed on Mars in 2004. They used a unique entry, descent, and landing (EDL) sequence that allowed for safe landing on the red planet. First, the rovers were encapsulated by heat shields that protected them from the heat of aerodynamic drag in the initial entry into the Martian atmosphere.

The India Space Research Organization (ISRO) is a fledgling national space agency compared with its older counterparts in the United States, Russia, and Europe. However, it is quickly making a name for itself in space research and has set an ambitious agenda for future space exploration missions. One key target for such research is Mars.

Today, we have four great observatories in space: the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the Compton Gamma-Ray Telescope.

The inaugural Space Education and Strategic Applications (SESA) Conference, sponsored by American Military University, will be held at the historic Quaker Meetinghouse, 2111 Florida Ave., NW, Washington, D.C., on Friday, April 17, 2020.

This week in 1979, Voyager 1 gave us our first closeup look at the gas giant Jupiter and several of its moons. The spacecraft provided NASA with 19,000 pictures before it left the Jovian system in early April.

Katherine Johnson, often called the “human computer” by her fellow NASA mathematicians, passed away this week at the age of 101. Her work went largely unnoticed for most of her life until the Oscar-nominated 2016 movie “Hidden Figures” that told the stories of Johnson and two other black women who worked at NASA.