On this day: August 7
POSTED: 02:38 PM PDT Aug 06, 2012
UPDATED: 11:00 PM PDT Aug 06, 2012
The Purple Heart is born, a comic legend dies, a man on a wire goes for a stroll a quarter of a mile above the sidewalks of Manhattan, and U.S. embassies in Africa are targeted in a terrorist attack, all on this day.
NASA
1959: Explorer 6 launches from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The small, spheroidal satellite was designed to study trapped radiation of various energies, galactic cosmic rays, geomagnetism, radio propagation in the upper atmosphere and the flux of micrometeorites. It also transmits the first pictures of Earth from orbit.
