OTD…March 6 and Kepler

#OTD in 2000…Atlantis launched on a mission to make the International Space Station a home in orbit

Ground controllers have beamed the final commands to NASA’s Kepler telescope, turning off the spacecraft’s transmitters and disabling the craft’s automatic recovery software after the planet-hunting observatory ran out of fuel last month.

#OTD…The first launch of Challenger in 1983 and Columbia’s shortened Spacelab mission in 1997