1980 in science

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

Astronomy and space explorationEdit

February 16 – A total solar eclipse is seen in North Africa and West Asia.
March 1 – The Voyager 1 probe confirms the existence of Janus, a moon of Saturn.
October 3 – The main-belt asteroid 2404 Antarctica is discovered by Czech astronomer Antonín Mrkos.
November 12 – Voyager program: The NASA space probe Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn when it flies within Template:Convert of the planet's cloud-tops and sends the first high resolution images of the world back to scientists on Earth.

May 22 – The arcade game Pac-Man is released in Japan.
June 23 – Tim Berners-Lee begins work on ENQUIRE,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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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<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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September – The "Chinese room" argument is introduced in a paper by John Searle.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
September 30 – Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel and Xerox introduce the DIX standard for Ethernet, which is the first implementation outside of Xerox and the first to support 10 Mbit/s speeds.
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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Convolutional neural networks are introduced in a paper by Kunihiko Fukushima.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

May 18 – The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens volcano in Washington (state) kills 57, including American volcanologist David A. Johnston.
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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
October 10 – The 7.1 Template:M El Asnam earthquake shakes northern Algeria with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme), killing 2,633–5,000.
November 23 – The 6.9 Template:M Irpinia earthquake shakes southern Italy with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme), killing 2,483–4,900.

Voprosy istorii estestvozhaniyi i tekhniki ("Questions of the history of science and technology") begins publication under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

May 8 – Global eradication of smallpox certified by the World Health Organization.
August 28 – First clinically useful image of a patient's internal tissues using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is obtained using a full-body scanner built by a team led by John Mallard at the University of Aberdeen.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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First four (ankle) bones of "Little Foot" (Stw 573), a nearly complete young female Australopithecus fossil skeleton capable of walking upright are found in the cave system of Sterkfontein, South Africa, eventually dated at around 3.67 million years BP but not identified at this time.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

German physician Klaus von Klitzing, working at the high magnetic field laboratory in Grenoble with silicon-based samples developed by Michael Pepper and Gerhard Dorda, makes the unexpected discovery that the Hall conductivity is exactly quantized, the Quantum Hall effect.

English watchmaker George Daniels patents the coaxial escapement.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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January 2 – Alexandra Illmer Forsythe (b. 1918), American computer scientist.
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.
March 18 – Ludwig Guttmann (b. 1899), German-born British neurologist and pioneer of paralympic games.
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 5 – Joachim Hämmerling (b. 1901), German-born Danish biologist.
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.
October 31 – Elizebeth Smith Friedman (b. 1892), American cryptanalyst.
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.