The year 1973 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• March 7 - Comet Kohoutek is discovered
• April 6 - Launch of Pioneer 11 spacecraft
• May 14 - Skylab, the United States' first space station, is launched.
• June 30 - Very long total solar eclipse visible in NE South America, the Atlantic, and central Africa. During the entire Second Millennium, only seven total solar eclipses exceeded seven minutes of totality. This was the last. Observers aboard a Concorde jet were able to stretch totality to about 74 minutes by flying along the path of the moon's umbra.
• July 25 - Soviet Mars 5 space probe launched.
• November 3 - Mariner program: NASA launches the Mariner 10 toward Mercury (on March 29, 1974 it became the first space probe to reach that planet).
• December 3 - Pioneer program: Pioneer 10 sends back the first close-up images of Jupiter.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics - Leo Esaki, Ivar Giaever, Brian David Josephson
  • Chemistry - Ernst Otto Fischer, Geoffrey Wilkinson
  • Medicine - Karl Von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen
• Turing Award - Charles W. Bachman

Births

Deaths

• February 11 - Hans D Jensen (b. 1907), German physicist.
• March 14 - Howard Aiken (b. 1900), computing pioneer.

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