July 14 · This Day in America
After 228 days and 134 million miles, a small spacecraft called Mariner 4 sweeps past Mars at six thousand miles' distance and does what no machine has ever done: it photographs another world up close. The pictures come home slowly, ten hours per frame, at a whisper of data. Engineers at JPL grow impatient and color a printout by hand while they wait. Then the real images arrive — and Mars is not the planet of canals and lost civilizations that humanity had dreamed about for a century. It is cratered, cold, moon-like, silent. The dream dies on the screen. But something larger is born: for the first time, a people on Earth looked at the surface of a planet they could not see, sent there by their own hands. The solar system had just become a place you could visit.
Source: www.nasa.gov
Also on this day · 1881
Near midnight, Sheriff Pat Garrett waits in the unlit bedroom of Pete Maxwell's house in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Billy the Kid walks in barefoot, looking for beef for a late supper, sensing someone there. He asks into the dark, twice, who's there. Garrett fires. The outlaw is dead at about twenty-one, and a frontier already half-myth gets its most enduring legend — argued over, doubted, and retold for a century and a half.
Source: www.britannica.com