Luna 16 was a Soviet Luna programme unmanned space mission. It was the first robotic probe to land on the Moon and return to Earth with a sample of lunar soil. Mare Fecunditatis returned the 101 gramme (3.56 ounce) sample. It was the Soviet Union's first successful lunar sample return mission and the third lunar sample return mission overall.

The September 11 attacks, also known as the 9/11 attacks, were a series of airline hijackings and suicide attacks carried out in 2001 against targets in the United States by 19 militants affiliated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda, and were the deadliest terrorist attacks on American soil in US history. The attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., caused widespread death and destruction and sparked a massive counter-terrorism effort in the United States. In New York, 2,750 people were killed, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 in Pennsylvania (where one of the hijacked planes crashed after passengers attempted to retake the plane); all 19 terrorists were killed.

Colonel H. H. Shri Sir Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji II, Jam Saheb of Nawanagar (10 September 1872 – 2 April 1933), also known as Ranji or K. S. Ranjitsinhji, was the ruler of the Indian princely state of Nawanagar from 1907 to 1933 and a notable Test cricketer for the English cricket team. He also represented Cambridge University in first-class cricket and Sussex in county cricket.

Luna 2 was the sixth of the Soviet Union's Luna programme spacecraft launched to the Moon, E-1 No.7. It was originally named the Second Soviet Cosmic Rocket and was nicknamed Lunik 2 in contemporaneous media. It was the first spacecraft to reach the Moon's surface and the first human-made object to communicate with another celestial body.The Luna 8K72 s/n I1-7B rocket launched the spacecraft on September 12, 1959. It took a direct route to the Moon.

Pink Floyd's ninth studio album, Wish You Were Here, was released on September 12, 1975 by Harvest Records and Columbia Records. Wish You Were Here was recorded over several sessions at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios) in London during 1975, based on material Pink Floyd composed while performing in Europe.

James Cleveland "Jesse" Owens was an American track and field athlete who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games. He was born on September 12, 1913.Owens specialised in sprints and long jumps and was dubbed "perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history" during his lifetime. At the 1935 Big Ten track meet in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he set three world records and tied another in less than an hour—a feat that has never been matched and has been dubbed "the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport."

"We Choose to Go to the Moon," officially titled the Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort, is a speech given by US President John F. Kennedy on September 12, 1962, to further inform the public about his plan to land a man on the Moon before 1970. Kennedy delivered the speech to a large crowd at Rice University Stadium in Houston, Texas, which was largely written by presidential advisor and speechwriter Ted Sorensen.

Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) was an American robotic space probe launched in November 1996 by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. MGS was a global mapping mission that investigated the entire planet, from the ionosphere to the surface. Mars Global Surveyor, as part of the larger Mars Exploration Program, monitored the atmosphere for sister orbiters during aerobraking and assisted Mars rovers and lander missions by identifying potential landing sites and relaying surface telemetry.