believed to still be in orbit around the Sun. February 13, 1961 (Monday) At Elisabethville, The Congo, Katangan Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo informed reporters, "I have called you together to announce the death of Patrice Lumumba and his accomplices," then went on to say that the group had been massacred the day before "by the inhabitants of a little village" days after escaping from prison. As it turned out, Lumumba had been executed by a Katangan firing squad a month earlier, on January 17. The confirmation of Lumumba's death stirred rioting in the Congo and around the world. NASA and McDonnell began discussions of an advanced Mercury spacecraft. McDonnell had been studying the concept of a maneuverable Mercury spacecraft since 1959. On February 1, Space Task Group (STG) Director Robert R. Gilruth assigned James A. Chamberlin, Chief, STG Engineering Division, who had been working with McDonnell on Project Mercury for more than a year, to institute studies with McDonnell on improving Mercury for future human spaceflight programs. Work on several versions of the spacecraft, ranging from minor modifications to radical redesign, got under way immediately. Early in March, the prospect of conducting extravehicular operations prompted Maxime A. Faget of STG to query John F. Yardley of McDonnell about the possibility of a two-man version of the improved Mercury. Yardley raised the question with Walter F. Burke, a McDonnell vice president, who in turn ordered that a design drawing of a two-man Mercury be prepared. STG described the work in progress at McDonnell to Abe Silverstein of NASA Headquarters in a meeting at Wallops Island, Virginia, March 17-20. On April 1, James T. Rose of STG joined Chamberlin in studying possible objectives for the advanced Mercury; he concentrated on mission planning, trajectory analysis, and performance. Hunting for geodes in the Coso Mountains near Olancha, California, rock collectors Wally Lane, Mike Mikesell and Virginia Maxey found a 500,000-year-old rock containing the "Coso artifact", a metal object that resembled, anachronistically, a spark plug. The rock and the ancient spark plug have not been seen since 1969. February 14, 1961 (Tuesday) Element 103, Lawrencium, was first synthesized by a team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley. Using the cyclotron at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, scientists Albert Ghiorso, Torbjorn Sikkeland, Almon E. Larsh and Robert M. Latimer bombarded Californium with Boron-10 and Boron-11 nuclei, combining the protons of the 98th and 5th elements