A number of worth-remembered events have made the day, 7 January a historic one. On this day in 1610, Italy’s Galileo Galilei first observed Jupiter’s satellites with his handmade telescope. On the same day in 1968, NASA launched Surveyor 7 to the moon for studying the chemical components of the lunar soil. On that very day in 2003, Egypt President Mubarak started the celebration of Christmas as a public holiday in the country. A horrific terrorist attack was executed at the office of Charlie Hebdo, Paris on 7 January 2015 by two Al-Qaeda members.
Below are some historic events that took place on this day:
Galileo Galilei observed Jupiter’s satellites; 1610:
Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei identified four moons orbiting Jupiter for the first time using a handmade telescope on 7 January 1610. Later, he observed the objects appeared to move in a linear, consistent pattern as he continued to look at the bodies. He initially believed them to be a group of stars. The understanding of nature at the time indicated that these items were moving in the “wrong direction.” After a few weeks, Galileo was certain that what he was watching was not a star but rather something circling Jupiter. The Galilean Moons are the modern names for Jupiter’s four largest satellites – Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
Surveyor 7 launched by NASA; 1968:
On 7 January 1968, NASA’s Surveyor 7, the last in the series, was launched from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas-Centaur rocket. Three days later, it made a soft landing on the moon’s surface near the outer rim of the crater Tycho in the southern hemisphere. It started reporting pictures of its landing spot and studying the chemical components of the lunar soil. The spacecraft made it through one 14-day lunar night, however, the second lunar day’s activities were restricted due to battery damage. On 21 February, Surveyor 7 completed its mission and sent back over 21,000 images of itself and its environs. It discovered lower iron concentrations at its landing site than at prior ones.
Christmas celebration began in Egypt; 2003:
On 7 January 2003, President Mubarak of Egypt began the celebration of Christmas. He declared it a public holiday despite the fact that the Christian community represented only about 10 percent of the country’s population. Coptic Christians mark 7 January as Christmas day as per the Coptic Orthodox calendar. Previously, the majority of the important national events used to be scheduled for days such as Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. Thus, Christians and other religious minorities used to feel marginalised as second-class citizens. Mamdouh Nakhla, the general manager of the Cairo-based World Centre for Human Rights, urged the government to declare Christmas Day a public holiday in 1995.
Charlie Hebdo Shooting; 2015:
On 7 January 2015, Saad and Cherif Kouachi, two French Muslim terrorists, broke into the Paris offices of the satirical weekly publication Charlie Hebdo. Armed with rifles and other firearms, the Kouachi brothers killed 12 individuals and injured 11 others. The assailants claimed connection to the Arabian Peninsula branch of the Islamic terrorist organisation Al-Qaeda. The group later admitted responsibility for the attack. Up until 9 January, a number of additional attacks were reported from that region, including the siege of the Hypercacher kosher supermarket, where a terrorist killed four Jewish people.
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