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 Heavens seven corresponds to the seven classical planets known to antiquity. Ancient observers noticed that these objects moved at different paces in the sky both from each other and from the fixed stars beyond them: Mercury, Venus, the Moon, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Unlike comets, which appeared in the sky with no warning, they did move in regular patterns that could be predicted. They also observed that objects in the sky influenced objects on earth, as when movements of the sun affect the behavior of plants or movements of the moon affect ocean tides. While others believe the seven