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One Step Beyond: The Sacred Mushroom
ABC airs the 79th episode of the supernatural anthology series One Step Beyond, hosted and directed by John Newland. Due to the episode’s focus on the mind-altering properties of mushrooms, this episode is excised from the running order of the show’s later syndicated reruns, despite host Newland claiming that it was the most poupular episode of the entire series.
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The 106th episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone airs on CBS. Dennis Hopper stars in an episode written by Serling.
The third episode of Larry Cohen’s science fiction series The Invaders, starring Roy Thinnes and produced by Quinn Martin’s QM Productions, premieres on ABC. Suzanne Pleshette (The Bob Newhart Show) guest stars.
The 78th episode of Irwin Allen’s science fiction series Lost In Space premieres on CBS, starring Guy Williams, June Lockhart, and Jonathan Harris.
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NBC airs the 14th episode of Leslie Steven’s “spy-fi” series Search, starring Tony Franciosa and Burgess Meredith. Annette O’Toole guest stars.
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One day before deorbiting the vacant space station for reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, Soviet military space officials fire the anti-aircraft cannon mounted on the exterior of space station Salyut 3 – the first test of spacecraft-to-spacecraft weapons in history (though there is no target on which to test the ammunition rounds). Without a steerable mount, in practice, the entire Salyut 3 station would need to have been pointed at the gun’s target. The station is destroyed by friction upon atmospheric reentry a day later.
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UK regional broadcaster HTV premieres the 
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Space Shuttle Discovery lifts off on the shortest shuttle flight since the 1981 test flights, lasting only three days. A classified Defense Department payload is delivered to orbit, with the help of the first Inertial Upper Stage booster developed by the U.S. Air Force. This mission is the first time that shuttles had to be swapped out prior to flight – thermal tile issues on Challenger prevented that shuttle from being used for this mission – as well as the first instance of a shuttle launch scrubbed because of concerns over freezing weather and ice at the launch site. Discovery returns via the Kennedy Space Center runway, with Commander Ken Mattingly, Pilot Loren Shriver, mission specialists Ellison Onizuka and James Buchli, and payload specialist Gary Payton aboard.
CBS airs the 15th episode of a revival of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Ralph Bellamy and Adam Arkin star in an episode comprised of three short stories, including one inspired by a Theodore Sturgeon short story.
Voyager 2 visits the third planet on its grand tour of the outer solar system, becoming the first and only man-made spacecraft to visit Uranus. Since the blue-green planet and its moon are tipped over, Voyager has fewer opportunities to gather images of the moons of Uranus, but a close pass by its innermost large satellite, Miranda, yields pictures of one of the stranger surfaces in the solar system: a moon that was ripped apart and melted back together in the distant past. The atmosphere of Uranus reveals almost no details to Voyager 2’s cameras in the scant visible light available this far from the sun, but ten new moons are discovered, and the planet’s elusive dark rings are captured in several images. With no other missions to Uranus in the pipeline, Voyager 2’s brief flyby remains the primary source of most of our knowledge of the seventh planet from the sun. It will now take Voyager 2 three years to reach Neptune, its final target.
CBS airs the 52nd episode of Ron Koslow’s fantasy series Beauty and the Beast, starring Ron Perlman, Jo Anderson, and Roy Dotrice. 
Cosmonauts Gennadi Manakov and Alexander Poleshchuk lift off aboard Soyuz TM-16, on a course for Russian space station Mir. In preparation for the upcoming joint international missions that will see American space shuttles docking with Mir, Soyuz TM-16 carries a new type of docking mechanism designed to test the docking port that will be used by visiting shuttles. Manakov and Poleshchuk remain aboard Mir for 179 days, returning to Earth in July 1993 with French spationaut Jean-Pierre Haigneré.
The week-long national syndication window opens for 
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Showtime airs the 46th episode of The Outer Limits, a revival of the 1960s science fiction anthology series. Kim Cattrall (Star Trek VI: The Unduscovered Country) and Teryl Rothery (Stargate SG-1) guest star.
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The 127th episode of Chris Carter’s modern-day science fiction series The X-Files airs on Fox, starring Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny. Geoffrey Lewis guest stars.
The 56th episode of Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict, airs in syndication, starring Robert Leeshock, Jayne Heitmeyer, Von Flores, and Richard Chevolleau.
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The Opportunity rover, identical to Spirit, lands on schedule and on target in Mars’ Meridiani Planum region, but initial readings from the surface of Mars indicate that the landing pod containing Opportunity has come to rest on its side. Telemetry signals from Opportunity announce that the the rover has arrived safely and intact, ready to begin its mission, and the opening of the landing vehicle returns Opportunity to its intended upright position. As with Spirit, Opportunity will remain on its landing platform for several days undergoing a series of diagnostic tests before rolling off to the Martian surface for independent exploration, and engineers are keeping a close eye out for signs of a computer problem that has plagued Spirit for several days.
Wanna-be fifth networks UPN and the WB both announce that they will go off the air in late 2006, after 11 years of struggling to make a dent against the “big four” networks. (Both networks signed on in January 1995, the WB premiering its programming one week before UPN went on the air with the premiere of Star Trek: Voyager; WB later found its own genre niche with the series adaptation of Joss Whedon’s Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and its popular spinoff, Angel, along with the “young Superman” prequel Smallville.) However, some of their programming may survive to be seen on a new joint venture between Warner Bros. and UPN’s parent network, CBS. This new network, The CW, will have programming and personnel held over from both defunct networks. The announcements do not mention how the merger will work out in broadcast markets where affiliate stations exist for both networks.
Word breaks across Hollywood that Disney has secured the services of J.J. Abrams, co-creator of Lost and director of the 2009 and 2013 movies set in a re-imagined Star Trek universe, to direct the much-anticipated Star Wars Episode VII, the first new movie in the series since Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm at the end of 2012. With a locked-in release date in 2015, Abrams is expected to start work on Episode VII as soon as post-production and promotion for Star Trek Into Darkness are complete for that movie’s May 2013 release.