March 17th 1930: astronaut Colonel James Benson Irwin, USAF, born in Pittsburgh PA.
In 1971 Irwin, Apollo 15 lunar module pilot, became the eighth man to walk on the Moon, spending over 18 hours on the surface. He also, on his return, became one of the first people to be grounded, quite literally, for smuggling postage stamps into space.
1852 – Asteroid 16 Psyche was discovered on March 17th 1852 by Annibale de Gasparis. Psyche is a large asteroid, about 200 km in diameter, accounting for about 1% of the mass of the entire asteroid belt. It’s an M-type asteroid, probably mostly nickel and iron.
Psyche is named for a mythological princess, who caught the eye of the god Cupid. The story is told by Lucius Apuleius in The Golden Ass.
In early 2017 NASA announced plans to send a probe to Psyche in 2023, as part of their Discovery Program, the main reason being that, as a metallic asteroid, it represents one of the few classes of objects in our neighbourhood that haven’t yet been visited.
1899 – Saturn’s moon Phoebe discovered by American astronomer W H Pickering. It, too, is about 200 km in diameter, and may be a captured centaur from the Kuiper belt. We have some spectacular photographs of Phoebe following the visit of the Cassini spacecraft in 2004.
It's All Going On Up There 