Sputnik launched 50 years ago today.

The Sputnik program was a series of unmanned space missions launched by the Soviet Union in late 1957 to demonstrate the viability of artificial satellites for exploring the upper atmosphere as part of the International Geophysical Year. It included Sputnik 1, the first man-made object to orbit earth.

The surprise launch of Sputnik 1 shocked the United States, which responded with a number of early satellite launches, including Explorer I, Project SCORE, and Courier 1B. The Sputnik crisis also led to the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA and NASA, and to major increases in U.S. government spending on scientific research and education.

Sputnik did much to change what was then science fiction into science reality. Wernher von Braun used Arthur C. Clarke's 1952 book, The Exploration of Space, to convince President Kennedy that it was possible to go to the Moon.

Life gets easier for Lost ETs

Google has added more than a million astronomical photographs stitched together to give users of Google Maps a deep picture of the sky.

The software will display diagrams of constellations, Hubble telescope pictures of the far reaches of the galaxy, and animated graphics of the planets and other bodies as they move in the sky. The sky portion of Google Earth is also, like the earth, fully searchable.