Good morning, Whitewater.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty degrees, and winds from the southwest at sixteen miles per hour. Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 4:44 PM. We’ll have 10h 11m 27s of daytime.
On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union launches a dog into space:
Laika, part Siberian husky, lived as a stray on the Moscow streets before being enlisted into the Soviet space program. Laika survived for several days as a passenger in the USSR’s second artificial Earth satellite, kept alive by a sophisticated life-support system. Electrodes attached to her body provided scientists on the ground with important information about the biological effects of space travel. She died after the batteries of her life-support system ran down.
At least a dozen more Russian dogs were launched into space in preparation for the first manned Soviet space mission, and at least five of these dogs died in flight. On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space, aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1. He orbited Earth once before landing safely in the USSR.
On this day in 1804, it’s fifty-million acres for a thousand a year:
1804 – Treaty at St. Louis
On this date Fox and Sauk negotiators in St. Louis traded 50 million acres of land in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois for an annuity of $1,000. The treaty allowed the tribes to remain on the land until it was sold to white settlers. However, Chief Black Hawk and others believed that the 1804 negotiators had no authority to speak for their nation, so the treaty was invalid. U.S. authorities, on the other hand, considered it binding and used it justify the Black Hawk War that occured in the spring and summer of 1832. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark, p. 32-33]
Google-a-Day asks a geography question:
What mountain in Switzerland includes three types of glacial erosion, and resembles an ancient Egyptian structure with four specific sides?