Roberta Score (US Antarctic Search for Meteorites Team) finds the meteorite ALH84001, which turns out to be a fragment of Mars; the meteorite is immediately noted for its unusual color. In 1996, possible signs of Martian life are found. The initial enthusiasm (supported by a press conference by President Clinton) soon gives way to other scientific interpretations, which do not imply life. Although there is no convincing evidence of Martian life, the initial paper and the enormous scientific and public attention it generated are considered turning points in the history of astrobiology.

The Space Shuttle releases the European Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), a laboratory that will remain in orbit for 6 years and which hosts experiments of various kinds, including Bacillus Subtilus spores subjected to various conditions of space radiation. Incredibly, 80% of the spores protected only by a thin sheet of aluminum foil survive; and even in colonies directly exposed to radiation, 1 spore in 10,000 survives after 6 years of radiation.

Launch of Vega 2, which on its journey to Halley’s Comet launches a balloon into the atmosphere of Venus that transmits for 46 hours and a probe that transmits from the surface for 57 minutes

First mission of the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-41D)

Green and Schwarz prove that Veneziano’s Superstring Theory is the only self-consistent theory that includes quantum gravity. But the main obstacle is that the mathematics needed to solve String Theory is not fully understood, and furthermore, there are countless solutions (millions and millions) for the possible geometries of the extra dimensions. If the mathematics does not uniquely identify some geometries, then perhaps all are solutions of the theory. This would imply (but was not clear in 1984) that there exists a plethora of universes with different geometries (the String Theory Landscape), and that we are in this because it could not be otherwise (the Weak Anthropic Principle). Our Big Bang would therefore not have been unique, but only one of countless in the Multiverse.

Paleontologist Peter Sheehan of the Milwaukee Public Museum, along with 200 volunteers, decides to conduct a systematic search for fossils in a well-known and well-trodden area: the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. The meticulous search lasts three years and leads to a tripling of the world’s fossil record for the Late Cretaceous period. The research also establishes that dinosaurs remained numerous until the KT event, 65 million years ago, with no indication of gradual extinction.

United States. The LIGO initiative is launched to build a gravitational wave detector (there will ultimately be two: one in Washington State and one in Louisiana). The initiative is supported by the NSF (National Science Foundation) and led by Kip Thorne of Caltech and Rainer Weiss of MIT. It will cost $240 million and will each have two 4km-long arms.

In Moscow, Yaakov Zeldovich and Andrei Starobinsij return to the question of the possible creation of a universe from nothing, or at least from the quantum vacuum. They discover that a simple flat universe with a finite topology curled up on itself can arise from a quantum fluctuation, provided that the curled-up distances in the three distinct directions are comparable (if they were very different, the singularity would have had infinite density).

American Robert Axelrod publishes in Science “The Evolution of Cooperation” or a Prisoner Dilemma tournament open to all scholars: each submitted algorithm can cooperate (cooperate) or defect to the enemy/attack (defect): the winning strategy turns out to be the TIT-FOR-TAT (blow for blow) by Professor Anatol Rapaport from Toronto, the strategy begins by always cooperating until it is attacked, after which it copies blow for blow what the interlocutor does; Other strategies: TIT-FOR-TWO-TATS (forgive the first strike), NAIVE-PROBER (naive investigator: like tit-for-tat but randomly attacks every now and then), REMORSEFUL-PROBER (forgive the opponent’s revenge), GRUDGER (forever avenger), HARRINGTON (the only “bad” strategy that survived past generation 20 but neared extinction around generation 1000), CHEAT (cheaters), ALWAYS-COOPERATE, ALWAYS-DEFECT

During the NATO exercise Able Archer, Kremlin officials are on the verge of becoming convinced that the West is about to launch a preemptive nuclear strike.

Bill Gates announces at a conference at the Palace Hotel in Manhattan that Microsoft is working on a windowing operating system that will run on IBM PCs and its clones. It will be called Windows.

Nobel Prize in Physics to William A. Fowler for his studies on the formation of chemical elements in the universe

The young Russian Andreij Linde presents the chaotic inflationary model of the Big Bang: he thus demonstrates that the current state of the universe could have emerged from a rather large series of initial configurations that were different from each other.

Subramanyan Chandrasekhar wins Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on black holes

Microsoft introduces Windows (Windows 1.0 actually hits stores on November 20, 1985)

Westinghouse Corp. Research Report on Programmable Assembly Systems, Pilot Project for Flexible Production Lines Using Robots

Launch of Venera 16, which will enter orbit around Venus, transmitting a radar map of the planet.

Launch of Venera 15, which will enter orbit around Venus, transmitting a radar map of the planet.

Arthur Rudolph, a member of von Braun’s German team, meets with officials from the Department of Justice. In 1981, American archives revealed that Rudolph had been a superintendent of the Mettelwerk/Dora Nordhausen concentration camp. The options presented to him were: leave the United States and renounce his American citizenship, or remain in the U.S. and face trial for war crimes and lose his NASA pension. The 76-year-old Rudolph returns to Germany.

The West German State Archives announces that Hitler’s diaries published by Stern and the Sunday Times (bought by Stern) are not only a fake, but a crude forgery; through Stern’s famous reporter, Gerd Heidemann, 4 million USD have gone up in smoke; the report: the paper is low-quality and chemical-based, the bleach is from 1955, the binding also contains bleach, the red threads on the cover are polyester and viscose, the labels signed by Hess and Bormann are all written with the same typewriter and in rapid succession, the ink is very recent: one or two years old.

The U.S. government has made public (unclassified) the report written by Enrico Fermi with observations immediately after the nuclear explosion at Trinity Site, New Mexico, in which the Italian-American physicist describes his rough (but accurate) estimate of the force of the explosion using slips of paper dropped from a height of 1.8 meters to estimate the strength of the wind.

First mission of the Space Shuttle Challenger (STS-6)

As part of aggressive American military maneuvers off Kamchatka, 6 US Navy aircraft from the aircraft carriers Midway and Enterprise violated the Soviet border by flying over Zeleny Island in the Kurile archipelago.

The United States is conducting aggressive military maneuvers near Soviet territorial waters in the Far East. Three aircraft carriers, part of a 40-ship fleet, with B-52 bombers and 23,000 troops, are maneuvering off Kamchatka.

Ronald Reagan announces the Star Wars Strategic Initiative, an ambitious long-term project to achieve the automatic shoot-down of ICBMs in space.

The Space Telescope under construction is dedicated to Edwin Hubble