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January 20 in spaceflight

25 orbital launches flew on January 20, the earliest of them in 1966, and 24 reached orbit. Below are the pictures NASA published on January 20 in 6 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.

Launches

ON RECORD

25MISSIONS

24 of them reached orbit. The earliest was 1966, the most recent 2025.

Recorded events

NONE FOUND

0ENTRIES

Wikipedia records no spaceflight or astronomy event on this date.

Pictures from this date

PUBLISHED

6IMAGES

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for January 20, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.

Published on January 20

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, for this calendar date in each of the last several years.

Io in True Color

2026

Io in True Color

The strangest moon in the Solar System is bright yellow. The featured picture, an attempt to show how Io would appear in the "true colors" perceptible to the average human eye, was taken in 1999 July by the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. Io's colors derive from sulfur and molten silicate rock. The unusual surface of Io is kept very young by its system of active volcanoes. The intense tidal gravity of Jupiter stretches Io and damps wobbles caused by Jupiter's other Galilean moons. The resulting friction greatly heats Io's interior, causing molten rock to explode through the surface. Io's volcanoes are so active that they are effectively turning the whole moon inside out. Some of Io's volcanic lava is so hot it glows in the dark.

NASA · public domain

Comet ATLAS Rounds the Sun

2025

Comet ATLAS Rounds the Sun

Why does Comet ATLAS have such colorful tails? Last week Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) passed its closest to the Sun -- well inside the orbit of Mercury -- and brightened dramatically. Unfortunately, the comet was then so angularly near the Sun that it was very hard for humans to see. But NASA's SOHO spacecraft saw it. Pictured is a SOHO (LASCO C3) image of Comet ATLAS that is a composite of several different color filters. Of the several tails visible, the central white tails are likely made of dust and just reflecting back sunlight. The red, blue, and green tails are likely ion tails with their colors dominated by light emitted by specific gases that were ejected from the comet and energized by the Sun. Currently, Comet ATLAS is showing long tails in southern skies but fading as it moves out of the inner Solar System. Growing Gallery: Comet ATLAS (G3)

NASA · public domain

Falcon Heavy Boostback Burn

2024

Falcon Heavy Boostback Burn

The December 28 night launch of a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida marked the fifth launch for the rocket's reusable side boosters. About 2 minutes 20 seconds into the flight, the two side boosters separated from the rocket's core stage. Starting just after booster separation, this three minute long exposure captures the pair's remarkable boostback burns, maneuvers executed prior to their return to landing zones on planet Earth. While no attempt was made to recover the Falcon Heavy's core stage, both side boosters landed successfully and can be flown again. The four previous flights for these side boosters included last October's launch of NASA's asteroid-bound Psyche mission. Their next planned flight is on the Europa Clipper mission scheduled for launch in October 2024.

© Dennis Huff — used with the credit NASA publishes

Galaxy Wars: M81 and M82

2023

Galaxy Wars: M81 and M82

The two dominant galaxies near center are far far away, 12 million light-years distant toward the northern constellation of the Great Bear. On the right, with grand spiral arms and bright yellow core is spiral galaxy M81. Also known as Bode's galaxy, M81 spans some 100,000 light-years. On the left is cigar-shaped irregular galaxy M82. The pair have been locked in gravitational combat for a billion years. Gravity from each galaxy has profoundly affected the other during a series of cosmic close encounters. Their last go-round lasted about 100 million years and likely raised density waves rippling around M81, resulting in the richness of M81's spiral arms. M82 was left with violent star forming regions and colliding gas clouds so energetic that the galaxy glows in X-rays. In the next few billion years, their continuing gravitational encounters will result in a merger, and a single galaxy will remain. This extragalactic scenario also includes other members of the interacting M81 galaxy group with NGC 3077 below and right of the large spiral, and NGC 2976 at upper right in the frame. Captured under dark night skies in the Austrian Alps, the foreground of the wide-field image is filled with integrated flux nebulae. Those faint, dusty interstellar clouds reflect starlight above the plane of our own Milky Way galaxy.

© Andreas Aufschnaiter — used with the credit NASA publishes

NGC 7822 in Cepheus

2022

NGC 7822 in Cepheus

Hot, young stars and cosmic pillars of gas and dust seem to crowd into NGC 7822. At the edge of a giant molecular cloud toward the northern constellation Cepheus, the glowing star forming region lies about 3,000 light-years away. Within the nebula, bright edges and dark shapes stand out in this colorful telescopic skyscape. The image includes data from narrowband filters, mapping emission from atomic oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur into blue, green, and red hues. The emission line and color combination has become well-known as the Hubble palette. The atomic emission is powered by energetic radiation from the central hot stars. Their powerful winds and radiation sculpt and erode the denser pillar shapes and clear out a characteristic cavity light-years across the center of the natal cloud. Stars could still be forming inside the pillars by gravitational collapse but as the pillars are eroded away, any forming stars will ultimately be cutoff from their reservoir of star stuff. This field of view spans about 40 light-years at the estimated distance of NGC 7822.

© Mark Carter — used with the credit NASA publishes

The Magnetic Field of the Whirlpool Galaxy

2021

The Magnetic Field of the Whirlpool Galaxy

Do magnetic fields always flow along spiral arms? Our face-on view of the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) allows a spectacularly clear view of the spiral wave pattern in a disk-shaped galaxy. When observed with a radio telescope, the magnetic field appears to trace the arms' curvature. However, with NASA’s flying Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) observatory, the magnetic field at the outer edge of M51's disk appears to weave across the arms instead. Magnetic fields are inferred by grains of dust aligning in one direction and acting like polaroid glasses on infrared light. In the featured image, the field orientations determined from this polarized light are algorithmically connected, creating streamlines. Possibly the gravitational tug of the companion galaxy, at the top of the frame, on the dusty gas of the reddish star-forming regions, visible in the Hubble Space Telescope image, enhances turbulence -- stirring the dust and lines to produce the unexpected field pattern of the outer arms.

NASA · public domain

Every launch on January 20

25 launches

ONLINE
  1. 2025Ceres-1 | 5 satellitesGESUCCESS
  2. 2024Qaem 100 | SorayaIRGCAFSUCCESS
  3. 2021Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink 16SpXSUCCESS
  4. 2021Electron | Another One Leaves The Crust (GMS-T)RLSUCCESS
  5. 2018Atlas V 411 | SBIRS GEO Flight 4 (SBIRS GEO-3)ULASUCCESS
  6. 2016PSLV XL | IRNSS-1EISROSUCCESS
  7. 2012Delta IV M+(5,4) | WGS-4 (USA-233)ULASUCCESS
  8. 2011Delta IV Heavy | NROL-49 (KH-11) (USA-224)ULASUCCESS
  9. 2011Zenit-3F | Elektro-L No.1RFSASUCCESS
  10. 2005Kosmos-3M | Parus 96NPSUCCESS
  11. 1994Proton-K/DM-2M | Gals 1KhSCSUCCESS
  12. 1988Soyuz-U2 | Progress 34CCCPSUCCESS
  13. 1983Vostok 8A92M | Tselina-D 39CCCPSUCCESS
  14. 1982Soyuz U | Zenit-6U 52CCCPSUCCESS
  15. 1981Soyuz U | Yantar-2K 15CCCPSUCCESS
  16. 1978Soyuz U | Progress 1CCCPSUCCESS
  17. 1977Kosmos-3M | Zaliv 23CCCPSUCCESS
  18. 1977Soyuz U | Zenit-2M 74CCCPSUCCESS
  19. 1976Kosmos-3M | Parus 5CCCPSUCCESS
  20. 1973Kosmos-3M | Tselina-O 17CCCPSUCCESS
  21. 1972Titan IIID | KH-9 2USAFSUCCESS
  22. 1971Vostok 8A92M | Meteor-1 7 (19L)CCCPSUCCESS
  23. 1970Kosmos 11K63 | DS-U2-MG 1CCCPSUCCESS
  24. 1969Proton / UR-500 K/D | Soyuz 7K-L1 No.13LCCCPFAILURE
  25. 1966Little Joe II | A-004NASASUCCESS

Sources and licences

Event text and thumbnails come from Wikipedia and are used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Images are drawn only from Wikimedia Commons, which does not accept non-free content — each thumbnail links to its file page, where its licence and author are recorded.

Launch records are from The Space Devs’ Launch Library 2. Pictures are NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day; NASA imagery is generally not subject to copyright, but individual APOD entries are frequently the property of the photographer, and each caption says which applies.

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