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March 4 in spaceflight

20 orbital launches flew on March 4, the earliest of them in 1968, and 17 reached orbit. Wikipedia records 5 spaceflight and astronomy events on March 4. Below are the pictures NASA published on March 4 in 6 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.

Launches

ON RECORD

20MISSIONS

17 of them reached orbit. The earliest was 1968, the most recent 2026.

Recorded events

IN THE RECORD

5ENTRIES

Spaceflight and astronomy entries from Wikipedia's record of this date, oldest first — from 1675 onward.

Pictures from this date

PUBLISHED

6IMAGES

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for March 4, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.

Published on March 4

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

Shapley 1: An Annular Planetary Nebula

2026

Shapley 1: An Annular Planetary Nebula

What’s looking back at you isn’t a cosmic eye, but Shapley 1, a beautifully symmetric planetary nebula. Shapley 1, also known as the Fine Ring Nebula or PLN 329+2.1, bejewels the southern sky constellation of the Carpenter's Square (Norma). The nebula is the result of a star near the mass of our Sun running out of fuel and shedding its outer layers. Glowing oxygen from those expelled layers makes up the circular halo. The bright central point is actually a binary: a white dwarf, the remaining stellar core after the outer layers are expelled into space, and another star, orbiting each other every 2.9 days. Shapley 1’s annular shape is due to our top-down view of the system and provides insight into the influence of central stars on planetary nebula structures.

© Peter Bresseler; Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II) — used with the credit NASA publishes

A Quadruple Alignment over Italy

2025

A Quadruple Alignment over Italy

Why does this Moon look so unusual? A key reason is its vivid red color. The color is caused by the deflection of blue light by Earth's atmosphere -- the same reason that the daytime sky appears blue. The Moon also appears unusually distorted. Its strange structuring is an optical effect arising from layers in the Earth's atmosphere that refract light differently due to sudden differences in temperature or pressure. A third reason the Moon looks so unusual is that there is, by chance, an airplane flying in front. The featured picturesque gibbous Moon was captured about two weeks ago above Turin, Italy. Our familiar hovering sky orb was part of an unusual quadruple alignment that included two historic ground structures: the Sacra di San Michele on the near hill and Basilica of Superga just beyond. Your Sky Surprise: What picture did APOD feature on your friend's birthday? (post 1995)

© Valerio Minato — used with the credit NASA publishes

Light Pillars Over Inner Mongolia

2024

Light Pillars Over Inner Mongolia

What's happening across that field? Pictured here are not auroras but nearby light pillars, a phenomenon typically much closer. In most places on Earth, a lucky viewer can see a Sun pillar, a column of light appearing to extend up from the Sun caused by flat fluttering ice-crystals reflecting sunlight from the upper atmosphere. Usually, these ice crystals evaporate before reaching the ground. During freezing temperatures, however, flat fluttering ice crystals may form near the ground in a form of light snow sometimes known as a crystal fog. These ice crystals may then reflect ground lights in columns not unlike a Sun pillar. The featured image was taken last month across the Wulan Butong Grasslands in Inner Mongolia, China.

© N. D. Liao — used with the credit NASA publishes

10 Days of Venus and Jupiter

2023

10 Days of Venus and Jupiter

Venus and Jupiter may have caught your attention lately. The impending close conjunction of the two brightest planets visible in clear evening skies has been hard to miss. With Jupiter at the top, starting on February 21 and ending on March 2, their close approach is chronicled daily, left to right, in these panels from Dhanbad, India. Near the western horizon, the evening sky colors and exposures used for each panel depend on the local conditions near sunset. On February 22, Jupiter and Venus were joined by the young crescent Moon. The celestial pair appeared to be only the width of a full moon apart by March 2. Of course on that date the two planets were physically separated by over 600 million kilometers in their orbits around the Sun. In the coming days Jupiter will slowly settle into the glare at sunset, but Venus will continue to move farther from the Sun in the western sky to excel in its current role as the brilliant evening star. Jupiter & Venus Conjunction Gallery: Notable Submissions to APOD

© Soumyadeep Mukherjee — used with the credit NASA publishes

The Multiwavelength Crab

2022

The Multiwavelength Crab

The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, expanding debris from massive star's death explosion, witnessed on planet Earth in 1054 AD. This brave new image offers a 21st century view of the Crab Nebula by presenting image data from across the electromagnetic spectrum as wavelengths of visible light. From space, Chandra (X-ray) XMM-Newton (ultraviolet), Hubble (visible), and Spitzer (infrared), data are in purple, blue, green, and yellow hues. From the ground, Very Large Array radio wavelength data is shown in red. One of the most exotic objects known to modern astronomers, the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star spinning 30 times a second, is the bright spot near picture center. Like a cosmic dynamo, this collapsed remnant of the stellar core powers the Crab's emission across the electromagnetic spectrum. Spanning about 12 light-years, the Crab Nebula is 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.

NASA · public domain

Mars in Taurus

2021

Mars in Taurus

You can spot Mars in the evening sky tonight. Now home to the Perseverance rover, the Red Planet is presently wandering through the constellation Taurus, close on the sky to the Seven Sisters or Pleiades star cluster. In fact this deep, widefield view of the region captures Mars near its closest conjunction to the Pleiades on March 3. Below center, Mars is the bright yellowish celestial beacon only about 3 degrees from the pretty blue star cluster. Competing with Mars in color and brightness, Aldebaran is the alpha star of Taurus. The red giant star is toward the lower left edge of the frame, a foreground star along the line-of-sight to the more distant Hyades star cluster. Otherwise too faint for your eye to see, the dark, dusty nebulae lie along the edge of the massive Perseus molecular cloud, with the striking reddish glow of NGC 1499, the California Nebula, at the upper right. Please take a short survey in aesthetics & astronomy: Sonification

© Petr Horalek — used with the credit NASA publishes

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What happened on March 4

  1. 1675

    John Flamsteed (pictured) was appointed the first Astronomer Royal by King Charles II of England.

    John Flamsteed ↗

  3. 1979

    The space probe Voyager 1 discovered the rings of Jupiter, the third ring system to be discovered in the Solar System, after those of Saturn and Uranus.

    Voyager 1 ↗

  4. 1986

    The Soviet Vega 1 begins returning images of Halley's Comet and the first images of its nucleus.

    Soviet Union ↗

Every launch on March 4

20 launches

ONLINE
  1. 2026Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 10-40SpXSUCCESS
  2. 2024Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 6-41SpXSUCCESS
  3. 2024Falcon 9 Block 5 | Transporter 10 (Dedicated SSO Rideshare)SpXSUCCESS
  4. 2024Falcon 9 Block 5 | Crew-8SpXSUCCESS
  5. 2023Qaem 100 | Nahid-1IRGCAFFAILURE
  6. 2021Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink 17SpXSUCCESS
  7. 2016Falcon 9 Full Thrust | SES-9SpXSUCCESS
  8. 2011Minotaur-C (Taurus XL) | GloryOSCFAILURE
  9. 2010Delta IV M+(4,2) | GOES-P (GOES 15)ULASUCCESS
  10. 1997Start-1.2 | ZeyaRVSN RFSUCCESS
  11. 1994Space Shuttle Columbia / OV-102 | STS-62LSOCSUCCESS
  12. 1992Molniya-M | Molniya-1T 83PRSCSUCCESS
  13. 1982Kosmos-3M | Taifun-2 11CCCPFAILURE
  14. 1980Soyuz U | Zenit-6U 17CCCPSUCCESS
  15. 1978Soyuz U | Zenit-2M 85CCCPSUCCESS
  16. 1972Voskhod | Zenit-2M 26CCCPSUCCESS
  17. 1970Thorad SLV-2H Agena D | KH-4B 9USAFSUCCESS
  18. 1970Voskhod | Zenit-2 79CCCPSUCCESS
  19. 1969Titan IIIB | KH-8 20USAFSUCCESS
  20. 1968Atlas SLV-3A Agena D | OGO 5USAFSUCCESS

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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