Mercury Seven part-time student at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1956 to 1959. Both astronauts were ultimately awarded their bachelor's degrees after their 1962 space flights. NASA introduced the astronauts in Washington on April 9, 1959. Although the agency viewed Project Mercury's purpose as an experiment to determine whether humans could survive space travel, the seven men immediately became national heroes and were compared by "Time" magazine to "Columbus, Magellan, Daniel Boone, and the Wright brothers." Two hundred reporters overflowed the room used for the announcement and alarmed the astronauts, who were unused to such a large audience. Because they
Seven Sisters (colleges) and Merope) were collectively referred to as "The Seven Sisters". In the field of astronomy a star cluster, in the constellation of Taurus, is also referred to as The "Pleiades" or the "Seven Sisters." The seven colleges explored the issue of coeducation in a variety of ways. Two, Radcliffe College and Vassar College, are no longer women's colleges. Radcliffe merged completely into Harvard College in 1999, and is now a research institute and no longer an undergraduate institution. The component parts of the College's campus, the Radcliffe Quadrangle and Radcliffe Yard, retain the designation "Radcliffe" in perpetuity, and serve or