The year 1959 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
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- January 2 – Soviet spacecraft Luna 1 is launched by a Vostok rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome; the first man-made object to attain escape velocity, it is intended to impact Earth's Moon, but an error causes it instead to become the first spacecraft to fly by the Moon and the first man-made object to enter heliocentric orbit.
- February 6 – At Cape Canaveral, Florida, the first successful test firing of a Titan intercontinental ballistic missile is accomplished.
- February 17 – Vanguard 2, the first weather satellite, is launched to measure cloud cover for the United States Navy.
- March 3 – Lunar probe Pioneer 4 becomes the first American object to escape dominance by Earth's gravity.
- April 9 – NASA announces its selection of seven military pilots to become the first United States astronauts, later known as the 'Mercury Seven'.
- May 28 – Jupiter AM-18 rocket launches two primates, Miss Baker and Miss Able, into space from Cape Canaveral in the United States along with living microorganisms and plant seeds. Successful recovery makes them the first living beings to return safely to Earth after space flight.
- June 25 – A KH-1 Corona satellite, believed to be the first operational spy satellite, is launched as science mission "Discoverer 4" from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, aboard a Thor-Agena rocket.
- July 7 – At 14:28 UT Venus occults the star Regulus. The rare event (which will next occur on October 1, 2044) is used to determine the diameter of Venus and the structure of Venus' atmosphere.
- August 7 – The United States launches the Explorer 6 satellite from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral.
- August 14 – Explorer 6 sends the first picture of Earth from orbit.
- September 14 – Soviet spacecraft Luna 2 becomes the first man-made object to crash on Earth's Moon.
- September 19 – Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison establish the scientific rationale for SETI with the publishing of their seminal paper "Searching for Interstellar Communications" in Nature.
- October 7 – Russian probe Luna 3 sends back the first images of the far side of Earth's Moon.
- October 13 – The United States launches Explorer 7.
- November 24 – Yardymli meteorite makes a landfall in Azerbaijan.
- December 4 – Little Joe 2, a mission in the Mercury program, carries Sam, a rhesus macaque monkey, close to the edge of space.
- Coma Berenicids discovered.[1]
- First successful test of a nuclear thermal rocket engine, as part of Project Rover at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States under Raemer Schreiber.[2]
Grassé, P.-P. (1959). "La reconstruction du nid et les coordinations inter-individuelles chez Belicositermes natalensis et Cubitermes sp. La théorie de la Stigmergie: Essai d'interprétation du comportement des termites constructeurs". Insectes Sociaux (6): 41–80.
Johnston, Wm. Robert (2005-09-14). "Vinca reactor accident, 1958". Database of radiological incidents and related events – Johnston's Archive. Retrieved 2012-07-02. Gould, R. Gordon (1959). "The LASER, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation". In Franken, P. A.; Sands, R. H. (eds.). The Ann Arbor Conference on Optical Pumping, the University of Michigan, 15 June through 18 June 1959. p. 128. OCLC 02460155. Challoner, Jack, ed. (2009). 1001 Inventions That Changed the World. London: Cassell. p. 754. ISBN 978-1-84403-611-0. Graham, Lois (1959). Effect of adding a combustible to atmosphere surrounding diffusion flame (Thesis). OCLC 45226021.