1980 in science

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The year 1980 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• November 12 – Voyager program: The NASA space probe Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn when it flies within 77,000 miles (124,000 km) of the planet's cloud-tops and sends the first high resolution images of the world back to scientists on Earth.

Chemistry

• John B. Goodenough, working with colleagues at the University of Oxford Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, identifies the cathode material that enables development of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery.
• Royal Society of Chemistry formed by merger of the Royal Institute of Chemistry, the Chemical Society, the Faraday Society and the Society for Analytical Chemistry, with headquarters in London.

Computer science

• May 22 – The arcade game Pac-Man is released in Japan.
• July – Microsoft's Bill Gates agrees to create an operating system for the new IBM Personal Computer. In September, David Bradley becomes one of the "original 12" engineers working on the project (under Don Estridge) and is responsible for the ROM BIOS code and for developing the Control-Alt-Delete command.
• Atari release a conversion of the hit arcade game Space Invaders for the Atari 2600 which popularises the home video game console.
• Usenet established at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University.
• Convolutional neural networks are introduced in a paper by Kunihiko Fukushima.

Geophysics

• June 6 – Luis and Walter Alvarez with Frank Asaro and Helen Michels propose the Alvarez hypothesis, that the mass extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by the impact of a large asteroid 66 million years ago, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.

Medicine

• The much-enlarged third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), produced under the control of Robert Spitzer, is published.
• Global campaign to eradicate Dracunculiasis (Guinea worm disease) begins at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• First commercial MRI whole body scanner manufactured by Oxford Instruments for installation at Hammersmith Hospital, London.

Zoology

• The Cooloola monster, an orthopteran, is discovered in Queensland, Australia.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – James Watson Cronin, Val Logsdon Fitch
  • Chemistry – Paul Berg, Walter Gilbert, Frederick Sanger
  • Medicine – Baruj Benacerraf, Jean Dausset, George D. Snell
• Turing Award – C. A. R. Hoare

Births

• January 31 – Dan Milisavljevic, Canadian astronomer.
• November 22 – Shawn Fanning, American computer programmer.

Deaths

• January 3 – Joy Adamson (b. 1910), Silesian-born Kenyan wildlife conservationist (murdered).
• January 8 – John Mauchly (b. 1907), American co-inventor of the ENIAC computer.
• February 1 – Toshiko Yuasa (b. 1909), Japanese-born nuclear physicist.
• February 7 – Secondo Campini (b. 1904), Italian jet engine pioneer.
• May 28 – Rolf Nevanlinna (b. 1895), Finnish mathematician.
• June 18 – Kazimierz Kuratowski (b. 1896), Polish mathematician.
• July 1 – C. P. Snow (b. 1905), English physicist and novelist.
• August 29 – Franco Basaglia (b. 1924), Italian psychiatrist.
• October 18 – Hans Ferdinand Mayer (b. 1895), German physicist.
• October 21 – Hans Asperger (b. 1906), Austrian pediatrician.
• November 4 – Elsie MacGill (b. 1905), Canadian aeronautical engineer, "Queen of the Hurricanes".
• December 16 – Hellmuth Walter (b. 1900), German-born mechanical engineer and inventor.