New Horizons flies by Pluto
New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe that was launched as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program. Engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), with a team led by Alan Stern, the spacecraft was launched in 2006 with the primary mission to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system in 2015, and a secondary mission to fly by and study one or more other Kuiper belt objects. On July 14, 2015, at 11:49 UTC, it flew 12,500 km (7,800 mi) above the surface of Pluto, which at the time was 34 AU from the Sun, making it the first spacecraft to explore the dwarf planet.
Los Angeles Metro Rail opened
The Los Angeles Metro Rail is an urban rail transit system serving Los Angeles County, California, United States. It consists of six lines, including four light rail lines (the A, C, E and K), and two rapid transit (known locally as a subway) lines (the B and D lines) serving 101 stations. In 2022, the system had a ridership of 57,299,800, or about 174,300 per weekday as of the fourth quarter of 2022.
Mariner 4 spacecraft flies by Mars
Mariner 4 was the fourth in a series of spacecraft intended for planetary exploration in a flyby mode. It was designed to conduct closeup scientific observations of Mars and to transmit these observations to Earth. It captured the first images of another planet ever returned from deep space; their depiction of a cratered, dead planet largely changed the scientific community's view of life on Mars. The spacecraft flew by Mars on July 14 and 15, 1965. Its closest approach was 9,846 km (6,118 mi) from the Martian surface.
Augustin-Jean Fresnel died
Augustin-Jean Fresnel was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light, excluding any remnant of Newton's corpuscular theory, from the late 1830s until the end of the 19th century. He is perhaps better known for inventing the catadioptric (reflective/refractive) Fresnel lens and for pioneering the use of "stepped" lenses to extend the visibility of lighthouses, saving countless lives at sea.
