Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini (1625–1712)

measured how long it took the planets Jupiter and Mars

to rotate. He also discovered four moons of Saturn and
the gap in the planet's rings. When NASA launched a
satellite to orbit Saturn and its moons in 1997, it was
fittingly dubbed Cassini.

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543)

proposed a model of the solar system that involved the
Earth revolving around the sun. The model wasn't
completely correct, as astronomers of the time
struggled with the backwards path Mars sometimes
took, but it eventually changed the way many scientists
viewed the solar system.

German physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

became one of the most famous scientists ever after
proposing a new way of looking at the universe that
went beyond current understanding. Einstein suggested
that the laws of physics are the same throughout the
universe, that the speed of light in a vacuum is
constant, and that space and time are linked in an
entity known as space-time, which is distorted by
gravity.

Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727)

is most famous for his work on forces, specifically
gravity. Building on the work of those who had gone
before him — he is quoted as saying, "If I have seen
further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants"
— he calculated three laws describing the motion of
forces between objects, known today as Newton's laws.

Frank Drake (born 1930)

is one of the pioneers in the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence. He was one of the founders of the Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and devised the
Drake equation, a mathematical equation used to
estimate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in
the Milky Way galaxy able to be detected.