< MMIII = 2003 >
Events in 2003
|14 January:|| ||The Julian calendar including its New Year's Day is delayed by 13 days.|
|16 January:|| ||During the launch of the 113th space shuttle mission the left wing of Columbia is damaged by a small piece of foam insulation, proving fatal when the shuttle returns to Earth sixteen days later.|
|20 January:|| ||Martin Luther King Day is celebrated in the United States the third Monday each year since 1986.|
|30 January:|| ||Muslims celebrate the Festival of Sacrifice on the tenth day of the month Dhu al-Hijjah.|
|1 February:|| ||During re-entry at the conclusion its 28th mission the 22-year-old space shuttle Columbia disintegrates over Texas, killing all seven crew members and prompting NASA to revaluate and ultimately terminate the space shuttle program.|
|1 February:|| ||In this Chinese New Year the Horse makes way for the Year of the Ram.|
|17 February:|| ||The London congestion charge is introduced, not the first of its kind, even in the UK, but probably the largest in the world.|
|19 March:|| ||The United States begins “Operation Iraqi Freedom” with air strikes on Baghdad.|
|14 April:|| ||The Human Genome Project is completed two years ahead of schedule.|
|16 April:|| ||Jews celebrate Pesach for the next seven or eight days.|
|20 April:|| ||The resurrection of Jesus Christ is celebrated Easter Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox as described by the Council of Nicaea in 325.|
|8 June:|| ||Seven weeks after Easter Christians celebrate Pentecost, possibly since 68 AD.|
|10 June:|| ||NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission begins with the launch of the Spirit Rover.|
|27 July:|| ||Bob Hope, American entertainer, dies in Toluca Lake, California, two months after his 100th birthday.|
|24 September:|| ||The Hubble Space Telescope begins collecting data for its Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the most detailed picture ever taken when the last photo is shot four months later.|
|6 October:|| ||Jews celebrate Yom Kippur since sunset last night.|
|14 October:|| ||The thirty days of Ramadan in the Islamic year 1424 begin at the first sighting of the lunar crescent.|
|17 October:|| ||The 508 m tall Taipei 101 in the Taiwanese capital is opened, overtaking the 452 m Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as the tallest building in the world.|
|28 October:|| ||Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg releases Facemash, the first incarnation of Facebook.|
|31 October:|| ||American mathematician Bill Cutler solves the Archimedes Stomachion puzzle, finding 536 unique solutions.|
|13 November:|| ||Muslims celebrate the Conclusion of the Fast on the first day of the month Shawwal.|
|26 November:|| ||The last Concorde airplane touches down after its last flight from London to its new home, the Bristol airfield where it was built.|
|17 December:|| ||The Peter Jackson movie “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” is released in the United States.|
|24 December:|| ||Christmas Eve starts off the holidays celebrating the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.|
People in 2003
The American soldier, Time Person of the Year.Gerald Ford, Arthur C. Clarke, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nelson Mandela, Kurt Waldheim, John Paul II, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Margaret Thatcher, Douglas Engelbart, Fidel Castro, Elizabeth II, Dario Fo, Gabriel García Márquez, Yasser Arafat, Neil Armstrong, Boris Yeltsin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Elizabeth Taylor, John Barry, Rutger Kopland, The 14th Dalai Lama, Kofi Annan, Pelé, John Hurt, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Stephen Hawking, Johnny Hallyday, Mick Jagger, Lech Wałęsa, Gerrit Komrij, Johan Cruyff, Vladimir Putin, Benazir Bhutto, Oprah Winfrey, Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates, Osama bin Laden, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Diego Maradona, Barack Obama, Axl Rose and Louise Brown celebrated their birthday this year.
The year 2003 was a common year starting on a Wednesday, just like 1913, 1919, 1930, 1941, 1947, 1958, 1969, 1975, 1986 and 1997 in the century before it and 2014, 2025, 2031, 2042, 2053, 2059, 2070, 2081, 2087 and 2098 in the next.
The coloured days highlight
other historical milestones, and recurring events such as anniversaries and
icons indicate the phases of the moon and appear only for dates in the Gregorian calendar, i.e. after 14 October 1582. The Chinese calendar is available only from 1645 to 2644, the first millenium since the last reform. The coloured columns mark the Sundays, the last day of the week per standard ISO-8601.
The normal calendar page for the current /year?2015 contains an introduction to the intriguing history of the year as we know it. The Calendar Converter has more detail. The so called Perpetual Calendar uses a trick from before the age of computers to find the weekday for any Gregorian date. Also see an overview of all historical events in the last six thousand years.
URL: < http://4umi.com/year?2003&a=1&z=0 >, created 23 January 2011, changed 13 September 2012, served 5 March 2015.