Today in History, April 24th
On April 24, 1990, the space shuttle Discovery launched the Hubble Space Telescope. Plus the Library of Congress and the Easter Rising.
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April 24 is best known as the day in 1990 when the space shuttle Discovery launched the Hubble Space Telescope. The date also saw the founding of the Library of Congress in 1800 and the start of Ireland’s Easter Rising in 1916.
The big story: Hubble Heads for Orbit (1990)
At 8:33 a.m. Eastern time on April 24, 1990, the space shuttle Discovery lifted off from Launch Pad 39B in Florida carrying a telescope that would become world-famous. The five-person crew, led by commander Loren Shriver, set Hubble loose the next day. Above the blur of Earth’s atmosphere, its 94.5-inch mirror was supposed to deliver views no ground telescope could match. Then the first pictures came back fuzzy. The outer edge of the main mirror had been ground to the wrong shape, a flaw called spherical aberration. In December 1993, astronauts aboard Endeavour made five back-to-back spacewalks and installed corrective optics and a new camera, essentially giving Hubble glasses. It worked. Over five servicing missions, Hubble has made more than 1.7 million observations that fed over 23,000 science papers. It has watched a comet smash into Jupiter, found moons around Pluto and seen galaxies more than 13.4 billion light-years away.
More events on April 24
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1792 | French army officer Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle composed “La Marseillaise,” which became France’s national anthem. |
| 1800 | President John Adams approved $5,000 to buy books for Congress, founding the Library of Congress. |
| 1863 | The Union Army issued General Orders No. 100, a code of conduct for how soldiers should treat prisoners and civilians. |
| 1898 | Spain declared war on the United States. The Spanish-American War lasted about three months. |
| 1916 | Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army seized key points in Dublin, launching the Easter Rising against British rule. |
| 1949 | Communist forces crossed the Yangtze River and occupied Nanjing, hastening the collapse of China’s Nationalist government. |
| 1953 | Queen Elizabeth II knighted Winston Churchill. |
| 1967 | Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died when his Soyuz 1 parachute failed, the first known death during a space mission. |
| 1980 | A U.S. military mission to rescue the 52 American hostages held in Iran failed, and eight servicemen were killed. |
| 1990 | Britain declared Gruinard Island off Scotland safe after 48 years of quarantine. It had been contaminated with anthrax in wartime tests. |
| 2005 | Benedict XVI formally began his papacy at a mass in St. Peter’s Square. |
Born on April 24
- 1815: Anthony Trollope, English novelist.
- 1904: Willem de Kooning, Dutch-born painter and a leading Abstract Expressionist.
- 1905: Robert Penn Warren, American writer of All the King’s Men and the first U.S. poet laureate.
- 1942: Barbra Streisand, American singer, actress and director.
Sources
- STS-31, NASA
- Hubble Overview, NASA Science
- Servicing Mission 1, NASA Science
- This Day in History: April 24, History.com
- On This Day: April 24, Britannica
- Anthony Trollope, Britannica
- Willem de Kooning, Britannica
- Robert Penn Warren, Britannica
- Barbra Streisand, Britannica
