Apollo 9 (March 3–13, 1969) was the third crewed mission in the United States Apollo program. Launched by a Saturn V rocket and flown in Low Earth Orbit, the mission flight-qualified the Lunar Module, showing that its crew could fly it independently, then rendezvous and dock, as would be required for Apollo 11, the first crewed lunar landing. Commander James McDivitt, Command Module Pilot David Scott, and Lunar Module Pilot Rusty Schweickart tested systems and procedures critical to landing on the Moon. A spacewalk tested the extravehicular life support backpack. McDivitt and Schweickart, entering the lunar module through the docking tunnel, became the first humans to pass between spacecraft without going outside them, two months after Soviet cosmonauts spacewalked to transfer between Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5. Apollo 9, a complete success, was followed by Apollo 10, the dress rehearsal for Apollo 11. (Full article...)

• ... that Arthur and Mary Sellwood had the idea for a book (cover shown) on Victorian railway murders in the 1940s, but did not write it until after a 'violent incident on a night train' in the 1970s?
• ... that Joywave's third album Possession incorporates samples of audio from the Voyager Golden Record into its songs?
• ... that as a law student, Burkhard Driest robbed a savings bank shortly before an examination, and later wrote a book and a film script about his experiences?
• ... that larvae of the tube worm Hydroides ezoensis prefer to settle on a substrate already inhabited by other worms of their own species?
• ... that Pope Francis's apostolic exhortationQuerida Amazonia does not explicitly endorse married Catholic priests, despite being called for by the Amazon synod?
• ... that in a January 2020 Premiership Rugby match, referee Luke Pearce appointed Manu Vunipola as Saracens captain, after Pearce decided that he did not want to speak with Jackson Wray?
• ... that future president John F. Kennedy came in second to Senator Estes Kefauver in the 1956 Democratic vice-presidential ballot?
• ... that police officers once arrested a Mexican Panther who was involved in drug trafficking?

• Global stock markets suffer their largest single-day decline since the 1987 crash.
• The World Health Organization declares the coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic, while the Italian government implements a national quarantine.
• In cricket, the Women's T20 World Cup concludes with Australia defeating India in the final(player of the match Alyssa Healy pictured).
• Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara win the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

• 1567 – A Spanish mercenary army surprised and killed a band of rebels in the Battle of Oosterweel near Antwerp in the Habsburg Netherlands, beginning the Eighty Years' War.
• 1639 – Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was named after its first principal donor, clergyman John Harvard.
• 1920 – The Kapp Putsch(participants pictured), an attempted coup aiming to undo the German Revolution of 1918–1919, briefly ousted the government of the Weimar Republic.
• 1954 – Việt Minh forces under General Võ Nguyên Giáp began a massive artillery bombardment on the French military, beginning the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the climactic battle of the First Indochina War.
• 1996 – A gunman killed sixteen children and a teacher at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, before committing suicide.

Daniel Lambert (b. 1770) ·Mustafa Reşid Pasha (b. 1800) ·Encarnacion Alzona (d. 2001)