1966 in science

The year 1966 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

February 3 – The unmanned Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft makes the first controlled rocket-assisted landing on the Moon.
March 1 – Venera 3 Soviet space probe crashes on Venus becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet's surface.
March 16 – NASA spacecraft Gemini 8 conducts the first docking in space, with an Agena target vehicle.
March 17 – Soviet Vostok-2 rocket serial U15001-09 carrying reconnaissance satellite Kosmos 112 is the first orbital launch from Plesetsk Cosmodrome.
March 31 – The Soviet Union launches Luna 10 which later becomes the first spacecraft to enter orbit around the Moon.
April 3 – Luna 10 is the first manmade object to enter lunar orbit.
May 25 – Explorer program: Satellite Explorer 32 is launched from the United States.
July 18 – Gemini 10 is launched from the United States. After docking with an Agena target vehicle, the astronauts then set a world altitude record of 474 miles.
August 10 – Lunar Orbiter 1, the first U.S. spacecraft to orbit the Moon, is launched.
November 17 – Notable display of the Leonids over the Americas.
December 15 – Janus, one of the moons of Saturn, is identified by Audouin Dollfus.
December 18 – Epimetheus, another of the moons of Saturn, is discovered, but mistaken for Janus which shares its orbit and they are not distinguished until 1978.
Mullard [Space Science Laboratory] established in England.

The first live specimen of a mountain pygmy possum, Australia's only truly hibernating marsupial, previously known only from the fossil record, is discovered.
German entomologist Willi Hennig's Phylogenetic Systematics is published in English, advancing the study of cladistics.

September 1 – While waiting at a bus stop Ralph H. Baer, an inventor with Sanders Associates in the United States, writes a four-page document that lays out the basic principles for creating a video game to be played on a television: the beginning of a multibillion-dollar industry.
Martin Richards designs the BCPL programming language.
Roger MacGowan and Frederick Ordway first suggest the concept of machine superorganisms in Intelligence in the Universe.

Walter C. Pitman and James Heirtzler present the "magic" Eltanin marine magnetic anomaly profile that confirms the hypothesis of seafloor spreading at mid-ocean ridges.

The Fabius function is published.
Chen Jingrun publishes Chen's theorem: every sufficiently large even number can be written as the sum of a prime and a semiprime.
David Mumford introduces Mumford–Tate groups.
Euler's [sum of powers conjecture] is disproven by L. J. Lander and T. R. Parkin when, through a direct computer search on a CDC 6600, they have found the counterexample 27⁵ + 84⁵ + 110⁵ + 133⁵ = 144⁵. Their paper announcing the result is one of the shortest published scientific articles ever published.

Gynecologist John McLean Morris and biologist Gertrude Van Wagenen at the Yale School of Medicine report the successful use of oral high-dose estrogen pills for post-coital contraception in women and rhesus macaque monkeys respectively.
Salbutamol, a bronchodilator, is discovered by a team led by David Jack at the Allen & Hanburys laboratory in the UK; it is launched in 1969 under the trade name Ventolin.

April 21 – An artificial heart is installed in the chest of Marcel DeRudder in a Houston, Texas, hospital.
Victor A. McKusick publishes the first edition of his catalogue of all known genes and genetic disorders, Mendelian Inheritance in Man.
Long-term potentiation, the putative cellular mechanism of learning and memory, is first observed by Terje Lømo in Oslo, Norway.
Andreas Rett first describes Rett syndrome.

Human Sexual Response is published by Masters and Johnson.On Aggression and Behind the Mirror are published by Konrad Lorenz.

January – First proposals for optical fiber communication presented by Charles K. Kao with George Hockham.
May 2 – Scottish inventor James Goodfellow obtains a UK patent for an automated teller machine using a plastic card and PIN.
October 16 – The "Caspian Sea Monster" ground-effect vehicle first flies in the Soviet Union.
Marie Van Brittan Brown originates the home security system in the United States.