On January 3, 1641, English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks passed away. He was the first scientist to demonstrate that the Moon moved around the Earth in an elliptical orbit and was the only person to predict the transit of Venus of 1639.
The last transit of Venus took place recently on 5 and 6 June 2012, and it was the last Venus transit of the 21st century. Venus transits are very rare events. The next one will be December 10–11, 2117. So it is much likely that this on was the very last Venus transit I had a chance to see in my lifetime.
C. Wilson, и T. Widemann. (2019)cite arxiv:1908.04269Comment: A response to ESA's Call for White Papers for the Voyage 2050 long-term plan in the ESA Science Programme, submitted in August 2019. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1703.10961.