August 05

1855 - Meteorologist and inventor William Henry Dines is born. He is responsible for inventing the Dines pressure tube anemometer, the first instrument to measure both the velocity and direction of wind.

1930 - NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong is born. He is most well-known as the first human to step foot on the moon.

1969 - NASA's Mariner 7 makes its closest fly-by of Mars. Pictures from this probe showed the Martian and Moon surfaces were very different, and also varied from the earlier Mariner 4 images. Other instruments on this spacecraft took atmospheric measurements, and revealed that the south polar ice cap composition was mostly frozen carbon dioxide.