10.Leif Ericsson

The first European to venture to North America was most likely Icelandic explorer Leif Ericsson. In the 11th century, the Norseman sailed off-course, arriving at a place he called "Vinland." Although no one knows quite where he landed, archaeologists have uncovered Viking ruins in Newfoundland, Canada.

Sacagawea

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark relied heavily on Sacagawea's navigation skills during their westward exploration of the Louisiana Purchase. While carrying her newborn son more than 4,000 miles, she taught the Corps of Discovery how to prepare edible plants and how to make leather clothes and moccasins. Along the way she met her long lost brother, chief of the Shoshone tribe in 1805.

8.Christopher Columbus

This son of an Italian wool weaver first set sail at the age of 13. Spanish royalty funded his later adventures in exchange for promises of new lands, spices, money and people to convert to Christianity. His fleet-The Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria-set sail in search of a direct route to the East from the West. But the navigator's underestimation of the Earth's circumference landed the ships in the Bahamas and Cuba in 1492.

7.Amerigo Vespucci

Columbus may have spotted the New World, but the continent's namesake, Amerigo Vespucci, was the first to know what he was looking at. After tracing the coast of South America in 1502, he realized the continent was uncharted territory, and not India, as previously thought.

6.James Cook

Captain James Cook sailed farther south than any other explorer before him, and proved the Northwest Passage to be a trade route fantasy. On board, Cook ran a clean ship to fend off diseases like scurvy. With his healthy crew, he mapped the coastline of Australia, as well as much of the Pacific Ocean. Hawaiians killed Cook in 1779 after he took their chief hostage.

5.William Beebe

Beebe's fascination with the natural world led him to dive deep into the ocean in a steel sphere called a bathysphere in 1934. A rubber hose lined with telephone and electricity wires connected the bathysphere with people on the surface. Submerged 3,028 feet below, Beebe said the world looked as strange as Mars.

4.Chuck Yeager

In 1947, General Charles "Chuck" Yeager was the first man to break the sound barrier. He topped his own record in 1952 when he flew at more than twice the speed of sound. Yeager paved the way, as it were, to space, sharing his aerial expertise by training almost half the pilots for the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo space programs.

3.Louise Arner Boyd

Louise Arner Boyd earned the nickname "Ice Woman" for her adventurous research in Greenland. Along with studying fjords and glaciers, she discovered an underwater mountain range in the Arctic Ocean. In 1955 she became the first woman to fly in a plane over the North Pole.

2.Yuri Gagarin

At 5-feet-tall, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the perfect size to fit into the cramped quarters of the Vostok 1 on man's maiden voyage into space. The spacecraft rocketed into space, orbited the Earth and, 108 minutes later, and arrived back on land on April 12, 1961.

1.Anousheh Ansari

In September 2006, X Prize sponsor Anousheh Ansari was the world's first Iranian to blast into space, as well as the first female space tourist. For $20 million she was trained for six months and learned the inner workings of the systems on the rocket and space station. Millions of people read Ansari's blog as she orbited Earth and dozens of Iranian women caught a glimpse of the space station from an observatory near Tehran.

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5 People Admired for Their Jail Time.

1. Nelson Mandela: The Political Prisoner

The son of a Tembu chief, Nelson Mandela [wiki] worked as a lawyer (an honest lawyer!) until becoming a leader of the African National Congress in 1949. Today, Mandela has a reputation for nonviolence, but in reality he embraced armed struggle and sabotage after the appalling 1960 massacre of nonviolent protesters in Sharpeville.

After admitting he helped found Spear of the Nation, the ANC’s military wing, Mandela was sent to prison for life. During his 28 years in jail, the charismatic Mandela became even more popular among black South Africans, and his writings from prison, particularly I Am Prepared to Die, galvanized international opposition to apartheid. Released in 1990, Mandela made the most of his freedom. Within four years, he helped negotiate an end to apartheid, won the Nobel Peace Prize, and became South Africa’s first black president.

2. 50 Cent: The Platinum Prisoner

In the hip-hop world, nothing sells like street cred. Anyone can rhyme about prison and shootings and drug deals - but it’s the precious rapper who can claim nine bullet wounds and several incarcerations that’ll move those albums.

For better or for worse, 50 Cent’s [wiki] payment of dues in jail certainly played a role in his seven-figure record contract. After all, the rap world was starving for authenticity, and 50 (aka Ben Jackson) was a true gangster in the Tupac mold. His résumé includes growing up selling crack and surviving being shot nine times in 2000 (he’s also been stabbed!).

Many critics, and some fellow rappers, have attributed his success more to his life’s story than his mediocre rhyming. But it’s probably not a trade worth making - most ex-con crack dealers who get repeatedly shot and occasionally stabbed tend not to end up with platinum albums.

3. Adolf Hitler: The Palace-Bound Prisoner

These days, Adolf Hitler [wiki] is perhaps history’s least admired individual. But during his reign as Führer, Hitler’s time in prison was seen as proof he sacrificed for National Socialism and Germany.

In reality, though, his hard time wasn’t particularly hard. Sentenced to five years in prison after failing spectacularly to take over the country in 1923, Hitler served only nine months. Also, he was "jailed" in a castle, and all his friends were either in jail with him or free to visit.

What’s a poor inmate to do? At the castle, Hitler decided to write (or dictate, actually) Mein Kampf, his self-aggrandizing autobiography/study in irrational hatred. Hitler originally gave the book the catchy title Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice, which Nazi publishers smartly shortened to the catchier My Struggle. Soon enough, much of Germany admired Hitler’s struggle - even if he was the really lying, stupid coward.

4. Leonard Peltier: The Pine Ridge Prisoner

While America was extricating itself from Vietnam in the early 1970s, a minor war was brewing on the home front. The American Indian Movement (AIM), advocating a return to Native traditions, was locked in a fierce battle with those Indians who supported, and were supported by, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs. Some 60 Native Americans died, but the story didn’t become big news until June 26, 1975, when two FBI agents were killed during a gunfight on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. AIM activist Leonard Peltier [wiki] was convicted of the murders.

Although quite probably guilty, many (including Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, and Amnesty International) have argued that Peltier is a political prisoner. President Clinton considered pardoning him in 2001 but didn’t. Perhaps hoping to pardon himself, Peltier ran for president in 2004 as the candidate for the somewhat ironically named Peace and Freedom Party.

5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Pacifist Prisoner

The most prominent theologian in Hitler’s Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer [wiki] openly and courageously opposed Nazism and condemned the church for "staying silent when it should have cried out." Although a pacifist, Bonhoeffer participated in a lengthy struggle to overthrow the Nazis that culminated in a failed assassination attempt on Hitler.

Already imprisoned for helping Jews escape to Switzerland, Bonhoeffer’s connection to the group resulted in his execution on April 9, 1945. His brilliant Letters and Papers from Prison remains in circulation, however, and is required reading for contemporary theologians.