Good morning.
Whitewater looks forward to a mostly sunny day with a high temperature of fifty-seven.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1897, playwright Thornton Wilder was born in Madison:
1897 – Thornton Wilder Born
On this date Thornton Wilder was born in Madison. A renowned author and playwright, he taught at the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1937. His playsOur Town (1938) and The Skin of our Teeth (1942) won Pulitzer Prizes and have been performed countless times by school and amateur theatrical companies in the decades since.You can read a 1928 article about his Wisconsin roots in our Wisconsin Local History & Biographies collection. [Source: Thornton Wilder Society]
Via Wisconsin Historical Society.
Google tests knowledge of American history today: “I established the first White House library, and was the first president’s wife to have earned a salary before marriage. What was my occupation?”
NASA was once more ambitious than commonly believed, as the agency had a plan for a Mars expedition decades ago: NASA’s 1966 plan for a mission to Mars. The flights imagined in the 1966 plan would have taken place between 1976 and 1986:
[Paul] Swan’s team proposed two manned Mars mission scenarios designed to explore these spheres of scientific interest. The first, the “minimal” missions, would occur between 1976 and 1986 and would use Apollo-level (that is, 1970) technology. The second, the “extended” mission, which was tentatively scheduled to occur in the 1982-1986 time period, would require technologies beyond the Apollo state of the art.The four minimal-mission surface crewmembers would explore a landing site within 30° of the martian equator for 21 days during a period when the biosphere at the site was at “peak growth.” While the four surface astronaut-scientists did their best to keep up with “a very active schedule” of wide-ranging data-gathering, two men would orbit Mars on board the mission “mothership,” the command module. Among other tasks, they would deploy automated probes to investigate the martian moons and any dust belts. Time near Mars for the minimal mission would total 40 days.
Even now, this seems ambitious beyond our abilities, but somehow admirably ambitious, too.