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The year 1961 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• January 31 - Ham, a 37 pound male chimpanzee, was rocketed into space in a test of the Project Mercury capsule designed to carry U.S. astronauts into space.
• April 12 - Yuri Gagarin is the first human in space.
• May 19 - Venera program: Venera 1 becomes the first manmade object to fly-by another planet by passing Venus (however the probe had lost contact with earth a month earlier and did not send back any data).
• May 25 - Apollo program: President Kennedy announces before a special joint session of Congress his goal to initiate a project to put a "man on the moon" before the end of the decade.

• The first quasar is discovered by Allan Sandage at Mt Palomar, California

Physics

• February 14 - Discovery of the chemical elements: Element 103, Lawrencium, is first synthesized (Berkeley, California).

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics - Robert Hofstadter, Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer
  • Chemistry - Melvin Calvin
  • Medicine - Georg von Békésy

Births

• March 10 - Laurel Clark (d. 2003), American astronaut.
• July 1 - Kalpana Chawla (d. 2003), Indian astronaut.
• September 23 - William C. McCool (d. 2003), American astronaut.

Deaths

• January 4 - Erwin Schrödinger (b. 1887), physicist.

Organisations

• Spain joins CERN.
• Yugoslavia leaves CERN.