On This Day: August 20

On This Day, for August 20th, by Britannica.

Today we’re looking at

• Two big stellar anniversaries
• The birth of a gothic horror hero
• The day the Prague Spring suddenly ran cold

We have a bonanza for space aficionados today with two major interplanetary anniversaries to commemorate, and a scientist to back us up.

On this day in 1975, Viking 1, the first of two Martian probes, was launched by NASA. The Viking 1 probe was the first planetary exploration mission to transmit pictures from the Martian surface. After completing nearly yearlong journeys, Viking 1 and Viking 2 entered orbits around Mars and spent about a month surveying landing sites. The Viking orbiters mapped and analyzed large expanses of the Martian surface, observed weather patterns, and photographed the planet’s two tiny moons, Deimos and Phobos. The landers measured properties of the atmosphere and soil of Mars and made colour images of its yellow-brown rocky surface and its dusty pinkish sky.

We spoke to Dr. Michelle Thaller, an astronomer and the assistant director for science communication at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, for some background on the Viking probes.

DR. THALLER: So there had been some spacecraft that orbited Mars that had taken pictures of the surface, but we hadn't really seen all of it yet. And we had not actually been to the surface with scientific instruments intact ready to explore, find out what this planet was really like. And I think that one of the first things that was a surprise from orbit, before we even landed there, was we began to see evidence that there was once quite a lot of water on the surface of Mars. And some of these landforms are still kind of controversial whether they were caused by wind or they were caused by flowing water. There were some other parts of the landscape that really could only have been formed by massive floods. And so that was very interesting because now we had evidence that a planet had really changed in the past.

Of course, these very first Mars landers were tasked with detecting life on Mars. As Dr. Thaller explains...

DR. THALLER: When these Landers went down, there certainly wasn't any obvious signs of life. We didn't see any plants growing on the surface, you know there was nothing that was very easily recognizable. But at the same time, they began these experiments to analyze the gases to the atmosphere, to analyze the soil.

And this is one of these things that I wonder how history is going to interpret this in the future. There were experiments that actually sent living microbes in the soil today, and there was a whole package of these experiments and one of them actually did produce what some people would argue with either a positive result or at least what we say is an ambiguous result. We couldn't quite tell one way or the other and indeed the scientist responsible for this, a very good scientist you, somebody that you know really understands what they're doing, still thinks that this experiment did detect microbes on Mars.

But then they sort of said, well, do we really understand the chemistry of the soil? Is it possible that we just don't know enough about the soil? And now that we know more about the soil on Mars, now that we've sent other rovers there, I think if anything, the result that this may have been microbial life has gotten perhaps a little bit better. So I wonder if as we, you know, right now can't say whether or not there are microbes on Mars. There's definitely some evidence that points to it, but we can't say 100% that we really, really know it. I wonder if in the future we're going to look back and say, this was when we first actually did detect life outside the earth.

Each orbiter and lander functioned long past the designed lifetime of 90 days after touchdown. Viking 1’s last data was transmitted from Mars in November 1982—a marathon seven years after the probe’s designed end time—and the overall mission ended the following year.

Two years after Viking 1’s launch, on this day in 1977, Voyager 2 was launched. Its twin space probe, Voyager 1, followed, launched on September 5. These two interplanetary probes were designed to observe and transmit information about the giant planets of the outer solar system and the farthest reaches of the Sun’s sphere of influence.

Here’s Dr. Thaller again.

DR. THALLER: We had sent some spacecraft out before to take some pictures of Jupiter and Saturn, but you're dealing with the technology from the 1960s, of course the pictures were wonderful but not very high quality by today's standards. And then it was actually an engineer at the jet propulsion laboratory that realized in the late seventies, there was going to be a golden opportunity.

There was this time coming in the late seventies when you could launch a spacecraft and it could actually go to Jupiter, but then on to Saturn, because they were both on the same side of the Sun and you could even possibly get Uranus and Neptune and maybe even Pluto. And so at first people started saying, okay, let's see if we could actually design the spacecraft. That would be up to this sort of grand tour of the solar system.

Voyager 1 swung by Jupiter on March 5, 1979, and then headed for Saturn, which it reached on November 12, 1980.

DR. THALLER: And the reason that we planned it that way is that Titan is one of the places in the solar system where there might actually be life. It's one of the life-friendly environments. It's probably life very different from us. But what we knew about Titan back then was that it had a very thick atmosphere. So Titan is a very large body, but when you hear moon, you sort of think of a small thing, but Titan is actually nearly the size of the planet Mars. And, uh, so there was this moon orbiting Saturn with this thick atmosphere. And so Voyager 1 plunged very close to it, if we could get a good look at it. And because of that, it threw it out of the plane of the solar system. And so that was the end of the planetary exploration for Voyager 1.

Voyager 2 traveled more slowly and on a longer trajectory than its partner. It sped by Jupiter on July 9, 1979, and passed Saturn on August 25, 1981. That’s years later, but consider the distance between the outer planets. It then flew past Uranus on January 24, 1986, and Neptune on August 25, 1989, making it the only spacecraft to have done so. By 2004 both Voyagers were well beyond the orbit of Pluto and were heading directly into interstellar space—another first for these twin spacecraft.

In 2012 the Voyagers became the longest-operating spacecraft, having functioned for 35 years and still periodically transmitting data. On August 25, 2012, Voyager 1 became the first space probe to enter interstellar space when it crossed a boundary called the heliopause, the outer limit of the Sun’s magnetic field and solar wind. Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause on November 5, 2018. Each craft carries a greeting to any form of extraterrestrial intelligence that might eventually find it. A gold-plated copper phonograph record—accompanied by a cartridge, needle, and symbolic instructions for playing it—contained images and sounds chosen to depict the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

Both the Viking and the Voyager missions marked the beginning of a new age of NASA. No longer were the motivations rooted in beating the Soviet Union to the punch. Powered by the energy lingering from the Moon landings, the 70s marked a golden age of space exploration, and our discoveries from that era are still some of the most fascinating.

I’m Meg Matthias. Here is more On This Day for August 20th.

Amy Adams, the versatile American actress who was first noted for her critically acclaimed portrayals of naive and charming characters in films like Julie and Julia (2009) and Enchanted (2007), was born on this day in 1974 in Aviano, Italy.

H.P. Lovecraft also has a birthday today! The American author of fantastic and macabre short novels and stories such as The Shadow over Innsmouth (published in 1936) and “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) was born on this day in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, and is often considered one of the 20th-century masters of the Gothic tale of terror.

Eero Saarinen, Finnish-born American architect who was one of the leaders in a trend toward exploration and experiment in American architectural design during the 1950s, was born on this day in 1910 in Kirkkonummi, Finland. You may know his work from the sweeping (and now vintage) TWA Flight Center at Kennedy Airport, in New York, or the Gateway Arch, a gleaming stainless steel monument to that reaches high above St. Louis, Missouri.

American comedienne and actress Phyllis Diller—a female stand-up comic noted for her raucous personality, outrageous hair on-stage, and self-deprecating humour—died in Los Angeles on this day in 2012.

On this day in 1619, it is thought that African slaves were first brought to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, thus setting in motion the American economic, social, and political reliance on chattel slavery for the next 250 years.

In Coyoacán, Mexico City, in May 1940, the expelled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky survived an attack on his house by a group of men with machine guns, but three months later, on this day in 1940, Trotsky was attacked again—this time stabbed in the head with an ice pick by Stalinist Ramón Mercader—and he died the next day.

Austria and Prussia signed the Convention of Gastein on this day in 1865, an agreement that temporarily set aside the final struggle between them for hegemony over Germany.

On this day in 1741, Danish explorer Vitus Bering, under the command of Tsar Peter I of Russia, encountered modern-day Alaska for the first time. Sea otter furs taken back to Russia opened a rich fur commerce between Europe, Asia, and the North American Pacific coast during the following century and opened the door for colonization in the centuries to come.

Jerry Lewis, the American comedian, actor, and director whose unrestrained comic style made him one of the most popular performers of the 1950s and ’60s, known best for a string of 16 comedies with Dean Martin as well as his solo productions, including The Nutty Professor, The Bellboy, and The Ladies Man, passed away on this day in 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The world-renowned Indian teacher B.K.S. Iyengar is often credited for introducing the Western world to Yoga with the release of his 1965 book Light on Yoga, which contained some 600 photographs of Iyengar demonstrating the asanas. Iyengar regularly taught Hatha Yoga—an orchestration of numerous postures, controlled breathing, and meditation designed to relax and develop mind, body, and spirit.
Iyengar spoke nonstop during his classes and used a personal approach characterized by sensitivity to his students’ physiques. His method took into account how difficult it is for students to meditate, relax, and control their breathing while being twisted into unusual postures. He introduced the use of various props—for example, blocks, chairs, and blankets—to make Yoga less daunting, especially to Westerners. In 1975 in Pune, Iyengar founded the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute, which he named for his late wife and ran with the assistance of his daughter Geeta and his son, Prashant. By the early 21st century his empire boasted more than 200 Yoga centres, several thousand teachers, and millions of students worldwide.

On this day in 2014, Inyengar died in Pune, Maharashtra, India, having won three of India’s highest civilian honours: the Padma Shri (1991), the Padma Bhushan (2002), and the Padma Vibhushan (2014).

Today the Czech Republic and Slovakia are peaceful independent countries. But after World War I, their territories were unified as Czechoslovakia. On this day in 1968, several Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia to bring the regime of Alexander Dubcek back into the fold after he began lifting restraints on freedom of expression and sought closer relations with the West in a period known as the Prague Spring.

During the Cold War, most of western Europe was aligned with the United States through membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), while the Soviet Union maintained garrisons in its satellite countries under the terms of the Warsaw Pact. The Warsaw Pact created a mutual-defense organization composed originally of the Soviet Union and Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. The treaty provided for a unified military command and for the maintenance of Soviet military units on the territories of the other participating states—allowing the Soviet Union to strengthen and enforce its control of the region.

In the 1960s, Czechoslovakia’s economy was progressively deteriorating. This discredited the government and led to only grudgingly granted and limited reforms. When these failed, the Communist Party’s leadership passed to the Slovak first secretary, Alexander Dubcek, in January 1968. He instituted a more openly reformist program that encouraged non-Communists to participate in the government. The government granted the press greater freedom of expression and rehabilitated victims of the political purges during the Joseph Stalin era. And if you listened to our Fast Facts for today, you heard the issues that just one anti-Stalinist faced outside the Warsaw Pact.

In April 1968, Dubcek advanced sweeping reforms that included autonomy for Slovakia, a revised constitution to guarantee civil rights and liberties, and plans for the democratization of the government. Dubcek claimed that he was offering “socialism with a human face.” By June, many Czechs were calling for more rapid progress toward real democracy—this brief period of liberalization was known as the Prague Spring, and the Soviet Union did not support it, to say the least.

Dubcek insisted that he could control the country’s transformation. But the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries viewed the developments as practically a counterrevolution. On the evening of August 20, 1968, Warsaw Pact armed forces invaded the country and quickly occupied it. As hard-line communists retook positions of power, the reforms were curtailed, and Dub?ek was deposed the following April.

This was just one of the struggles that took place during the Cold War. The fight between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was often ideological, where the battlefield was in the hearts and minds of leaders inside other governments' buildings across the world.

Thanks for listening today. Whether you’re an alien listening to this on a golden record in space, or a revolutionary brushing up on people’s movements from the past, there’s always more to read and discover at Britannica.com. Special thanks to Dr. Michelle Thaller of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Our program was written by Emily Goldstein and edited by yours truly. For Britannica, I’m Kurt Heintz. And I’m Meg Matthias.

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