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 Martyrs of Tehran Seven Martyrs of Tehran The Seven Martyrs of Tehran were seven prominent Bábis executed at Tehran in 1850. After the Battle of Fort Tabarsi, mere adherence to the Báb could be sufficient to lead to a death sentence, as most famously in the case of the Seven Martyrs of Tehran, a group of seven prominent Bábis who were executed in public by beheading in February 1850. Comprising three merchants (including a maternal uncle of the Báb), two clerics, a leading dervish and a government official, the seven were all men of high social rank who could easily have saved their