Posts tagged as:

Days

The Gregorian Calendar

November 17, 2008

1 January : the first day of the year in the Gregorian calendar used by most developed countries.

The Gregorian calendar is the calendar that is used nearly everywhere in the world. A modification of the Julian calendar, it was first proposed by the Neapolitan doctor Aloysius Lilius, and was decreed by Pope Gregory XIII, for whom it was named, on 24 February 1582 (Note: The papal bull Inter gravissimas was signed in the year 1581 for unknown reasons, but printed on 1 March 1582. Although the use of the date 1581 is often attributed to the supposed adoption by the papacy of a reckoning by which the year began on 25 March, other contemporaneous papal bulls have years that do not agree with March years, let alone years since a pope was named or other types of years.)

[Read More]

{ 0 comments }

Space Shuttle Discovery

July 25, 2008

“Space Shuttle Discovery has flown 33 flights, spent 241.95 days in space, completed 3,808 orbits, and flown 98,710,673 statute miles (158,859,429 km) in total, as of December 2006. It has flown the most flights of all Space Shuttles so far (a title it is likely to keep). Discovery has also flown on more individual flights than any other spacecraft in history and is likely to retain this honor for some time as no planned launch vehicles (neither American nor International) have a designed lifespan of more than 10 flights. Discovery has flown both “return to flight” missions after the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters: STS-26 in 1988 and STS-114 in 2005.”
[source]

{ 0 comments }