The Soviet Union launches the unmanned space probe Luna 23 toward the moon, intended to gather surface samples from the Mare Imbrium region for return to Earth. The sample collection hardware is unable to complete its task after landing, and ground controllers are only able to receive partial scientific data from the lander, whose batteries run out within three days of landing. It won’t be until 2012, when NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographs Luna 23’s landing site from orbit, that the truth will be learned: the lander tipped over on its side during a descent mishap, leaving it intact but unable to gather a soil sample.
The 18th episode of The Six Million Dollar Man is broadcast on ABC, starring Lee Majors and Richard Anderson. Monte Markham guest stars.
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ABC airs the 
The ninth episode of Filmation’s live-action Shazam! series airs on CBS, starring Jackson Bostwick, Michael Gray and Les Tremayne.
The Soviet Union launches Soyuz 16, a six-day manned space mission to test modifications to the Soyuz vehicle design ahead of 
“Kee Games” (a shell company created by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell) introduces a new arcade game, a video war between two artillery commanders called 
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The eighth episode of the British comedy series Robert’s Robots airs on ITV licensee Thames Television, starring John Clive (A Clockwork Orange, Yellow Submarine) as eccentric inventor Robert Sommerby and Nigel Pegram as one of his robot creations. This is the beginning of the show’s second season.
NASA and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration launch NOAA-4, a weather satellite intended to operate in a near-polar low Earth orbit. NOAA-4 is based on the already-flown ITOS satellite design, and will operate without any major malfunctions through November 1978.
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The first transmission from Earth designed to be a message for interstellar listeners is broadcast from the newly-refurbished Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico. Weighing in at 210 bytes, the message is a binary transmission that, when properly assembled, provides a graphical representation of Earth’s solar system, a human being, the makeup of human DNA and the elements from which it is constructed, and the population of Earth. Though the Arecibo dish is pointed in the direction of the M13 globular cluster at the time of the message’s transmission, that cluster will have moved in the 25,000 years it takes for the message to reach that location (and, in any case, Earth and its entire solar system will have moved in the 25,000 additional years it would take to receive a reply), so the message is more of an interstellar technology demo than a message in a bottle.
Electric Light Orchestra‘s fourth album, 
Charisma Records releases 
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NASA’s Pioneer 11 space probe passes close to Jupiter, barely 27,000 miles above the giant planet’s cloudtops, again encountering radiation capable of frying spacecraft electronics. Pioneer 11 captures the first images of Jupiter’s polar cloud structure and pulls off a daring gravity assist maneuver: the planet’s gravity flings Pioneer 11 up and over the north polar region and across the solar system for a