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March 4

In 1909… President William Howard Taft approves Congressional Gold Medals for the Wright brothers.
In 1936… The last great passenger-carrying airship, a veritable behemoth in its day, takes to the air for the first time. The German dirigible LZ 129, the Hindenburg, is powered by four 1,320-hp Daimler-Benz DB 602 diesel engines. The Hindenburg makes its first Atlantic crossing in the record time of 64 hours 53 minutes on May 6.
In 1948… The first American civilian to fly at supersonic speeds is Herbert Henry Hoover in Bell X-1 in Muroc, California.
1994 – Space shuttle Columbia launches into orbit for STS-62 . The primary mission of it’s two week flight was microgravity experiments. The mission also featured a number of biomedical experiments focusing on the effects of long duration spaceflight.

Pioneer 10 was the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt
It’s main mission was to make direct observations of Jupiter, which it passed by on December 3, 1973. It was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 36A on March 3, 1972 (as we talked about yesterday)
Pioneer 10 is heading in the direction of Aldebaran, located in Taurus. By some definitions, Pioneer 10 has become the first artificial object to leave the solar system. It is the first human-built object to have been set upon a trajectory leading out of the solar system. However, it still has not passed the Oort cloud.
Its objectives were to study the interplanetary and planetary magnetic fields, solar wind parameters, cosmic rays, transition region of the heliosphere, neutral hydrogen abundance, distribution, size, mass, flux, and velocity of dust particles, Jovian radio waves, atmosphere of Jupiter and some of its satellites (particularly Io), and to photograph Jupiter and its satellites.
There is no longer communication with the probe; the last contact was in 2003 and a final attempt at contact failed Today in 2006.

And that is what happened TODAY in Aviation History. See you Tomorrow!

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