NASA announces that the Spirit rover has exceeded its mission goals of 90 continuous Martian days of operation since landing, with over 600 meters of the Martian surface covered. NASA applies for, and receives approval on, a plan to keep Spirit and Opportunity roving through September, almost tripling the rovers’ planned life span. The extended mission, made possible by a budget boost of $15 million, will give engineers the chance to try handing control over to the Rovers’ built-in systems, and it’ll afford a greater opportunity to examine the unusual rocks and evidence of past bodies of water on the Martian surface.
The seventeenth full-time crew of the International Space Station lifts off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard Soyuz TMA-12. Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko take up residence on the ISS for 199 days. Arriving with them on the ISS for a ten-day stay is South Korean astronaut Yi So-Yeon, who returns to Earth aboard Soyuz TMA-11 with the Expedition 16 crew.
SpaceX launches the unmanned Dragon CRS-8 (Commercial Resupply Mission 8) to the International Space Station, carrying supplies and experiments, as well as delivering via its cargo trunk the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), the first new addition to the ISS since 2011. The flight is a success, and for the first time, the Falcon 9 first stage returns intact to an unmanned drone barge in the Atlantic Ocean, where it can be refurbished and reused. Though SpaceX has previously brought an intact booster down on dry land, this is the first success in several attempts to recover the spent first stage at sea.
Comedian and actor Chuck McCann, a familiar TV face from his start in children’s television in New York in the 1950s to his near-ubiquity in both television shows and commercials in the 1970s and 1980s, dies of congestive heart failure at the age of 83. He continued to be a fixture on children’s television nationally, including a stint on the Sid & Marty Krofft Saturday morning kids’ sci-fi comedy 
The CW airs the 61st episode of Legends Of Tomorrow, starring Caity Lotz, Matt Ryan, Brandon Routh, and Tala Ashe. 