Today, November 9th, is Carl Sagan's birthday

Carl Edward Sagan was born November 9, 1934 in Brooklyn, New York.
His father, Samuel Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from today's Ukraine.
His mother, Rachel, was a housewife from New York.

Sagan claimed that his "sense of wonder" came from his father, who in his free time gave apples to the poor or helped soothe labor-management tensions within New York's garment industry.

After his family moved to Rahway, New York, e attended Rahway High School, where he was a straight A student.
By graduation, his classmates had voted him "Most Likely to Succeed."

Though only 16, he was admitted to the University of Chicago, where he earned a B.S. degree in Physics in 1955.
He went on to earn an M.S. degree in Physics in 1956, before earning a PhD in 1960.

In 1961, he published an article in the journal "Science" on the atmosphere of Venus, while also working with NASA's Mariner 2 Team, and served as a "Planetary Sciences Consultant" to the Rand Corporation.

He became an assistant professor at Harvard, where he lectured, performed research, and advised graduate students from 1963 to 1968, as well as working at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass.

In 1968, Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard.
Cornell University astronomer Thomas Gold invited Sagan to join the faculty there.
Sagan accepted Gold's offer and remained a faculty member at Cornell for nearly 30 years until his death in 1996.

Sagan was associated with the U.S Space Program from it's inception,
From the 1950's onward, he worked as an adviser to NASA, where one of his duties included briefing the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon.

Sagan was married three times and had five children.

Isaac Asimov described Sagan as one of only two people he ever met whose intellect surpassed his own.

After suffering from myelodysplasia for two years, and receiving three bone marrow transplants from his sister Carol, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62.