Big Finish Productions releases the 175th Doctor Who audio drama in its main monthly range, starring Sylvester McCoy and Tracey Childs. 
Earl Green is the creator, curator, and head writer of theLogBook.com.
Big Finish Productions releases the 175th Doctor Who audio drama in its main monthly range, starring Sylvester McCoy and Tracey Childs.
Scientists, analyzing Hubble Space Telescope spectographic data taken during a transit of the exoplanet HD 189733b against its parent star, reveal that they have determined the planet’s color in visible light. The doomed gas giant, only 63 light years away, is said to be a “deep azure blue” not unlike how Earth’s oceans appear from space, though in this case the color is theorized to be the result not of water, but of silicate rain – airborne glass – blowing in 7,000mph winds as the atmosphere is blasted away due to the planet’s proximity to its sun.
Big Finish Productions releases the 13th Doctor Who audio drama in its Fourth Doctor Adventures range, starring Tom Baker and Mary Tamm. David Warner guest stars.
Using Hubble Space Telescope images of Neptune taken between 2004 and 2009, astronomers discover a 14th moon circling the outermost planet of the solar system. Not given an official, mythologically-derived name yet, the moon is initially designated S/2004 N1, and is a small, dark body with a diameter of roughly 12 miles, making it Neptune’s smallest discovered satellite to date, orbiting the planet once a day at a distance of 65,400 miles.
A two-man spacewalk outside the International Space Station is called off when water begins collecting inside the helmet of astronaut Luca Parmitano’s spacesuit. Originally scheduled as a six-and-a-half-hour maintenance spacewalk, the EVA is called off at one hour and the astronauts make a hasty return to the airlock. Once inside, an estimated half liter of water is found inside Parmitano’s space helmet; the remainder of the tasks scheduled for this spacewalk are rescheduled for a later EVA.
In a live half-hour reality-show-style special broadcast simultaneously around the world, the BBC reveals that actor Peter Capaldi will be the twelfth incarnation of the last Time Lord in Doctor Who. Capaldi has already appeared in the series once (in 2008’s The Fires Of Pompeii) and in the third season of the spinoff series Torchwood. At the age of 55, Capaldi is the oldest actor to play the Doctor since William Hartnell, and represents a significant departure from his youthful predecessor, who is leaving the TARDIS at the age of 30. Capaldi’s first Doctor Who episodes will not be seen until 2014.
GNP Crescendo records releases an expanded edition of Jerry Goldsmith’s soundtrack from the movie Star Trek: Insurrection, remastering and expanding the original 1998 album with additional material, including music not used in the film.
Big Finish Productions releases the 176th Doctor Who audio drama in its main monthly range, starring Sylvester McCoy and Tracey Childs.
Astronomers using the Keck Observatory’s Hawaii-based telescopes and near-infrared cameras capture an image of a devastating volcanic eruption on Io, one of Jupiter’s largest moons (and known since 1979 to be very volcanically active). The eruption, unleashing enough molten material to reshape hundreds of square miles of Io’s surface, also reveals that the material erupted is hotter than any eruption in Earth’s recorded history. This is the most violent eruption seen to date in the solar system, and caps off two weeks of intense activity observed by the astronomers.
Big Finish Productions releases the 177th Doctor Who audio drama in its main monthly range, starring Sylvester McCoy and Tracey Childs.
Big Finish Productions releases the 178th Doctor Who audio drama in its main monthly range, starring Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton.
The president of Nintendo through the latter half of the 20th century, Hiroshi Yamauchi, dies at the age of 85. Having dropped out of college to assume control of Nintendo from his ailiing grandfather in 1949, Yamauchi transformed the company from a maker of playing cards into a power player in the electronic game market, even though Nintendo’s first video game product was a licensed version of the American-made Magnavox Odyssey. Twice, Yamauchi boldly decided to break into the American video game market with no guarantee of success: once with the arcade game Donkey Kong, and again with the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System, even after a Stateside licensing deal with Atari fell through at the last minute, depriving the NES of Atari’s existing marketing and distribution channels.
Part of the 37th full-time crew of the International Space Station lifts off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard Soyuz TMA-10M. Oleg Kotov, Sergey Ryazansky and Michael Hopkins take up residence on the ISS for 166 days, becoming part of the Expedition 37/38 crews. Use of the recently developed “fast track” trajectory resumes, taking Soyuz from launch to docking at the ISS in under six hours. This crew returns to Earth in March 2014 aboard the same vehicle.
Orbital Sciences’ unmanned Cygnus cargo spacecraft is grappled and docked to the International Space Station via remote manipulator arm. This demonstration model of the Cygnus cargo ship had been launched ten days earlier via Orbital Sciences’ Antares booster from Wallops Island, Virginia. With 1,300 pounds of crew supplies, experiments and other cargo aboard, the Cygnus vehicle is expected to remain attached to the station for a full month before being jettisoned to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.
The 24th episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW. Summer Glau (Firefly, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chornicles) guest stars in the second season premiere.
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Bound for planet Jupiter in 2015, the unmanned space probe Juno swings past Earth to catch a gravity assist boost from its home planet. Launched in 2011, Juno slips past Earth at a distance of only 350 miles, boosting its speed to 93,000 miles per hour relative to the sun, fast enough to cross the distance between Earth and its moon in three hours (by comparison, the Apollo manned missions of the 1960s took three days to make that trip). But as it comes out of Earth’s shadow, Juno goes into a failsafe mode to protect the spacecraft against an unanticipated fault. Juno is brought back online within two days as it continues on the final leg of its flight to Jupiter.
Scott Carpenter, Mercury astronaut and the second American to orbit Earth, dies at the age of 88, having recently suffered a stroke. A decorated military pilot, Carpenter became a test pilot in 1954, and was selected as one of the seven Mercury astronauts in 1959. He became the second American astronaut to orbit Earth by coincidence, as fellow Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton had been grounded by a medical condition, bumping Carpenter up to the pilot of the fourth Mercury flight. That was his only spaceflight, as he retired from NASA in 1967.
The BBC announces that broadcast archive company TIEA has recovered nine missing episodes of Doctor Who, all from the Patrick Troughton era, completing one story of which only one episode was previous held in the BBC archives (The Enemy Of The World) and almost completing another story (The Web Of Fear), which is now missing only the third of its six episodes. All nine episodes have been found in surprisingly good condition in at a regional broadcaster in Nigeria, which had received the episodes from a Hong Kong broadcaster in the early 1970s. All nine episodes are made available for digital download, with remastered DVD releases due in time for the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who in November 2013. The find had been the subject of wild speculation on the internet for months.
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Intrada releases a 3-CD set of original episode scores from the first season of Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, featuring music by series theme composer Stu Phillips, among others. This marks the first release for any soundtrack material from the show beyond the series pilot (already re-released by Intrada).
The 25th episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW. Michael Jai White (For Better Or Worse, Black Dynamite) guest stars.
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Big Finish Productions releases the Doctor Who audio drama The Light At The End, celebrating 50 years of Doctor Who and featuring all of the surviving classic series Doctors and many of their companions.
The 26th episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW. Michael Eklund (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Wynonna Earp) guest stars.
This series is not yet chronicled in the LogBook. You could join theLogBook team and write this guide or support the webmaster’s efforts to expand the site.
Bloomsbury Academic publishes Paul Atkinson’s well-illustrated non-fiction book Delete: A Design History of Computer Vapourware, detailing never-made hardware platforms from computer manufacturers both well-known and obscure.
Big Finish Productions releases the 179th Doctor Who audio drama in its main monthly range, starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant.
The 27th episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW. Caity Lotz (Mad Men, Legends Of Tomorrow) guest stars.
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India launches its first deep space unmanned mission, sending the Mangalayaan probe toward the planet Mars. Using the proven Polar Satellite launcher, India’s entry into the field of interplanetary exploration runs up a bill equivalent to only $70,000,000. Mangalayaan – known to much of the rest of the world as MOM (Mars Orbiter Mission) – is designed to survey the Martian atmosphere and examine the planet’s surface from orbit. It will arrive at Mars ten months later.
The 28th episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW. Caity Lotz (Mad Men, Legends Of Tomorrow) and Dylan Neal (Babylon 5: The Legend Of The Rangers) guest star.
This series is not yet chronicled in the LogBook. You could join theLogBook team and write this guide or support the webmaster’s efforts to expand the site.
Soyuz TMA-11M is launched from Russia, on a fast-track trajectory to the International Space Station. The crew – Mikhail Tyurin, Rick Mastracchio and Koichi Wakata – arrives just six hours after liftoff. Each of the crew has been in space on at least three prior missions. Also aboard the Soyuz is the Olympic torch, on its own first visit to space; the torch, along with the Expedition 37 crew, returns to Earth in May 2014. Though Soyuz vehicles are usually handed off to the next returning crew, Soyuz TMA-11M returns to Earth with the same crew after a six-month stay. This mission marked the first time the International Space Station was crewed by nine people simultaneously since the end of the Space Shuttle era.
The 29th episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW. Caity Lotz (Mad Men, Legends Of Tomorrow) guest stars.
This series is not yet chronicled in the LogBook. You could join theLogBook team and write this guide or support the webmaster’s efforts to expand the site.
The BBC debuts the Doctor Who minisode Night Of The Doctor on the internet, reintroducing Paul McGann as the eighth Doctor in his first on-screen appearance since the 1996 TV movie and depicting his apparent regeneration into a previously unknown incarnation of the Doctor, as played by John Hurt. The minisode debuts on McGann’s birthday, but was originally intended to premiere much closer to the 50th anniversary special, Day Of The Doctor, until it became apparent that word of McGann’s secretive return to Doctor Who was about to be leaked.