1894
Percival Lowell establishes an observatory near Flagstaff after sending Harvard astronomer A.E. Douglass to scout locations in the Arizona territory.
1906
Douglass joins the faculty at the University of Arizona and begins a long struggle to secure an observatory on campus.
1916
Douglass establishes the Steward Observatory with a $60,000 donation.
1923
The Steward Observatory is formally dedicated, with a 36-inch telescope using the first large telescope mirror cast in the United States. The telescope is transferred to Kitt Peak in 1962 and remains in use today.
1930
Pluto is discovered by the Lowell Observatory's Clyde Tombaugh.
1950s
1951: Richard A. Harvill begins his 20-year tenure as UA president, during which the university sees enormous growth, both in student enrollment and faculty positions as it becomes one of the leading research universities of the West.
1955: Renowned astronomer Gerard P. Kuiper of the University of Chicago issues a call for a new, high-resolution photographic lunar map. Though he receives little response at the time, Kuiper secures a grant for the project in April 1957.
Oct. 4, 1957: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. Seen as the "Dawn of the Space Age," Sputnik spurs the United States into action.
Jan. 31, 1958: The United States launches Explorer I, its first successful spacecraft. The satellite discovers radiation belts around the Earth.
July 29, 1958: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the Space Act, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, effective on Oct. 1 of that year.
October 1958: Kitt Peak National Observatory is founded after a three-year survey of more than 150 mountain ranges across the nation determines the mountaintop southwest of Tucson is the best site.
March 3, 1959: Launch of the U.S. Pioneer 4 Lunar flyby, after three previous craft failed, with a magnetometer instrument led by future UA scientist Charles P. Sonett. It becomes the first U.S. spacecraft to escape Earth's gravity.
1960s
1960: Kuiper is recruited to the University of Arizona and establishes the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Kuiper's groundbreaking lunar atlas is published that year.
1961: Kitt Peak founding director Aden Meinel leaves to join the UA faculty as an astronomy professor.
1963: The U.S. Geological Survey's Flagstaff Science Center opens as home of the agency's Branch of Astrogeology. Apollo astronauts would conduct training missions around Flagstaff from 1964 to 1973.
July 31, 1964: With Kuiper as lead scientist, NASA's Ranger 7 reaches the moon, becoming the United States' first successful mission to another body in the solar system.
Seventeen minutes before its planned crash into the lunar surface, Ranger 7 snaps this picture — the first image of the moon ever taken by a U.S. spacecraft. In its final moments, Ranger 7 transmits close-up pictures of the lunar surface. The Ranger program's goal was to begin high-resolution mapping of the lunar surface in preparation for a future lunar landing. Kuiper announces the results as a "great day for science."
1964: NASA funds the $1.2 million UA Space Sciences Building, named for Kuiper months after his death in 1973.
1964: Meinel becomes the founding director of the UA's Optical Sciences Center, which later would became the UA College of Optical Sciences.
1968: The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, to be renamed the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in 1981, opens on Mount Hopkins, south of Tucson.
June 10, 1969: The Defense Department cancels the Manned Orbital Laboratory project, leaving seven 72-inch mirror blanks that Meinel obtained as the foundation for the Multiple Mirror Telescope.
July 20, 1969: Apollo 11's lunar module touches down, with astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin becoming the first men to walk on the surface of the moon.
1970s
1971: John P. Schaefer takes over as president of the UA, continuing to aggressively raise the university's research profile until leaving in 1982.
Nov. 13, 1971: NASA's Mariner 9 successfully enters Mars' orbit, becoming the first spacecraft from Earth to orbit another planet.
1972: The Department of Planetary Sciences is established as an academic unit at the UA to complement the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, with Charles P. Sonett the first to lead the combined units.
May 9, 1979: Meinel's revolutionary Multiple Mirror Telescope begins operation at Mount Hopkins, south of Tucson. It is the third-largest optical telescope in the world at the time of its dedication, and it remains in service until 1998.
1980
UA astronomer Roger Angel establishes the Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory, using a honeycomb structure he developed in backyard experiments to cast giant, lightweight mirrors of borosilicate glass. The lab would move to its current location under the football stadium's east wing in 1985.
Continue the journey online
Learn more about the University of Arizona's involvement in space science, beginning with its start in the 1890s and into the future with upcoming missions. http://go.azstarnet.com/spaceu
