1997 in science

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The year 1997 in science and technology involved many significant events, listed below.

[edit] Astronomy and space exploration

January 17 – Explosion of a Delta II rocket carrying a military GPS payload shortly after liftoff from Cape Canaveral.
February 13 – Tune-up and repair work on the Hubble Space Telescope is started by astronauts from the Space Shuttle Discovery.
July 4 – Mars Pathfinder lands on the surface of Mars
August 25 – Launch of Explorer 71 of the Explorer program of spacecraft
October 30 – First successful test flight of the ESA's Ariane 5 expendable launch system

February 22 – In Roslin, Scotland, scientists announce that an adult sheep named Dolly had been successfully cloned and was born in July 1996
March 4 – United States President Bill Clinton bars federal funding for any research on human cloning
April 25 – Scientists announce that Human artificial chromosomes have been created.
July 10 – In London, scientists report their DNA analysis findings from a Neandertal skeleton which support the out of Africa theory of human evolution placing an "African Eve" at 100,000 to 200,000 years ago
November 19 – In Des Moines, Iowa, Bobbi McCaughey gives birth to septuplets in the second known case where all seven babies were born alive, and the first in which all survived infancy.

May 11 – IBM's Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov, the first time a computer defeated a chess grand master in a match. Deep Blue had defeated Kasparov before, but had never won a match against him.

October 15 – The first supersonic land speed record is set by the ThrustSSC team from the United Kingdom

January 17 – Clyde Tombaugh (b. 1906), astronomer, discoveror of Pluto
April 7 – Georgi Shonin (b. 1935), cosmonaut.
March 9 – Christopher George Latore Wallace (b. 1972), rapper
May 2 – John Carew Eccles (b. 1903), psychologist
August 24 – Louis Essen (b. 1908), physicist, co-developer of the first practical atomic clock
September 4 – Hans Eysenck (b. 1916), psychologist