1961 in science

The year 1961 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

* January 31 - Ham, a 37 pound male chimpanzee, was rocketed into space in a test of the Project Mercury capsule designed to carry U.S. astronauts into space.
* April 12 - Yuri Gagarin is the first human in space.
* May 19 - Venera program: Venera 1 becomes the first manmade object to fly-by another planet by passing Venus (however the probe had lost contact with earth a month earlier and did not send back any data).
* May 25 - Apollo program: President Kennedy announces before a special joint session of Congress his goal to initiate a project to put a "man on the moon" before the end of the decade.

* The first quasar is discovered by Allan Sandage at Mt Palomar, California

Physics

* February 14 - Discovery of the chemical elements: Element 103, Lawrencium, is first synthesized (Berkeley, California).

Awards

* Nobel Prizes
** Physics - Robert Hofstadter, Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer
** Chemistry - Melvin Calvin
** Medicine - Georg von Békésy

Births

* March 10 - Laurel Clark (d. 2003), American astronaut.
* July 1 - Kalpana Chawla (d. 2003), Indian astronaut.
* September 23 - William C. McCool (d. 2003), American astronaut.

Deaths

* January 4 - Erwin Schrödinger (b. 1887), physicist.

Organisations

*Spain joins CERN.
*Yugoslavia leaves CERN.