Launches
ON RECORD19MISSIONS
17 of them reached orbit. The earliest was 1964, the most recent 2026.
ARCHIVE // DAY OF YEAR
March 12 in spaceflight
19 orbital launches flew on March 12, the earliest of them in 1964, and 17 reached orbit. Wikipedia records 1 spaceflight and astronomy event on March 12. Below are the pictures NASA published on March 12 in 6 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.
Recorded events
IN THE RECORD1ENTRY
Spaceflight and astronomy entries from Wikipedia's record of this date, oldest first — from 1811 onward.
Pictures from this date
PUBLISHED6IMAGES
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for March 12, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.
Published on March 12
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, for this calendar date in each of the last several years.
2026
A Near-Full Rotation of Uranus
For the first time we are witnessing outer planet Uranus take center stage and pirouette. Uranus is one of the Solar System’s strangest planets, lying on its side and spinning like a rotisserie chicken. The featured video is composed of over 1000 spectra taken over 15 hours of continuous viewing by JWST's NIRSpec instrument while Uranus rotates. The data captures the behavior of Uranus’s ionosphere: the ionized layer of a planet’s atmosphere that strongly interacts with the planet's magnetic field. The aurora’s rosy glow traces the complex interplay between Uranus's misaligned rotation and magnetic axes. Clouds can be seen as bright spots traveling across the ice giant. The blue-to-red colors represent low-to-high altitudes, showing a brand new three-dimensional view into how energy is distributed throughout the planet’s atmosphere. In the image on the left, everything is framed by the rings of Uranus. This is the most detailed look into the atmosphere of Uranus achieved yet! Almost Hyperspace: Random APOD Generator
NASA · public domain
2025
NGC 772: The Fiddlehead Galaxy
Why does this galaxy look like a curly vegetable? The Fiddlehead spiral galaxy likely gets its distorted spiral appearance from a gravitational interaction with its close-by elliptical companion NGC 770, seen just below. Cataloged as NGC 772 and Arp 78, the Fiddlehead spans over 200,000 light years, is a nearby 100 million light years beyond the stars of our Milky Way galaxy, and is visible toward the constellation of the Ram (Aries). But in the featured image, the Fiddlehead appears to have another companion -- one with a long and fuzzy tail: Comet 43P/Wolf-Harrington. Though the comet appears to be aimed straight at the massive galaxy, it is actually much closer to us, residing only light minutes away -- well within our Solar System. The comet will never reach the distant spiral galaxy, nor is it physically related to it. By a fortunate trick of perspective, though, these two cosmic wonders briefly share the same frame taken late last year from Calern, France.
© Jean-François Bax & Serge Brunier, OCA/C2PU; Text: Ogetay Kayali (Michigan Tech U.) — used with the credit NASA publishes
2024
A Galaxy-Shaped Rocket Exhaust Spiral
What's that over the horizon? What may look like a strangely nearby galaxy is actually a normal rocket's exhaust plume -- but unusually backlit. Although the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, USA, its burned propellant was visible over a much wider area, with the featured photograph being taken from Akureyri, Iceland. The huge spaceship was lifted off a week ago, and the resulting spectacle was captured soon afterward with a single 10-second smartphone exposure, before it quickly dissipated. Like noctilucent clouds, the plume's brightness is caused by the Twilight Effect, where an object is high enough to be illuminated by the twilight Sun, even when the observer on the ground experiences the darkness of night. The spiral shape is caused by the Falcon rocket reorienting to release satellites in different directions. Stars and faint green and red aurora appear in the background of this extraordinary image.
© Seung Hye Yang — used with the credit NASA publishes
2023
Saturn's Hyperion: A Moon with Odd Craters
What lies at the bottom of Hyperion's strange craters? To help find out, the robot Cassini spacecraft that once orbited Saturn swooped past the sponge-textured moon and took images of unprecedented detail. A six-image mosaic from the 2005 pass, featured here in scientifically assigned colors, shows a remarkable world strewn with strange craters and an odd, sponge-like surface. At the bottom of most craters lies some type of unknown dark reddish material. This material appears similar to that covering part of another of Saturn's moons, Iapetus, and might sink into the ice moon as it better absorbs warming sunlight. Hyperion is about 250 kilometers across, rotates chaotically, and has a density so low that it likely houses a vast system of caverns inside.
NASA · public domain
2022
Point Reyes Milky Way
Northern winter constellations and a long arc of the Milky Way are setting in this night skyscape looking toward the Pacific Ocean from Point Reyes on planet Earth's California coast. Sirius, alpha star of Canis Major, is prominent below the starry arc toward the left. Orion's yellowish Betelgeuse, Aldebaran in Taurus, and the blue tinted Pleiades star cluster also find themselves between Milky Way and northwestern horizon near the center of the scene. The nebulae visible in the series of exposures used to construct this panoramic view were captured in early March, but are just too faint to be seen with the unaided eye. On that northern night their expansive glow includes the reddish semi-circle of Barnard's Loop in Orion and NGC 1499 above and right of the Pleiades, also known as the California Nebula.
© Dan Zafra — used with the credit NASA publishes
2021
Messier 81
One of the brightest galaxies in planet Earth's sky is similar in size to our Milky Way Galaxy: big, beautiful Messier 81. Also known as NGC 3031 or Bode's galaxy for its 18th century discoverer, this grand spiral can be found toward the northern constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear. The sharp, detailed telescopic view reveals M81's bright yellow nucleus, blue spiral arms, pinkish starforming regions, and sweeping cosmic dust lanes. Some dust lanes actually run through the galactic disk (left of center), contrary to other prominent spiral features though. The errant dust lanes may be the lingering result of a close encounter between M81 and the nearby galaxy M82 lurking outside of this frame. M81's faint, dwarf irregular satellite galaxy, Holmberg IX, can be seen just below the large spiral. Scrutiny of variable stars in M81 has yielded a well-determined distance for an external galaxy -- 11.8 million light-years.
© Wissam Ayoub — used with the credit NASA publishes
What happened on March 12
1811
Peninsular War: A day after a successful rearguard action, French Marshal Michel Ney once again successfully delays the pursuing Anglo-Portuguese force at the Battle of Redinha.
Peninsular War ↗
Every launch on March 12
19 launches
ONLINE
- 2026Long March 2D | Shiyan 30 03-04CASCSUCCESS
- 2026Long March 8A | SatNet LEO Group 20CASCSUCCESS
- 2026Firefly Alpha | Stairway to SevenFASUCCESS
- 2025Falcon 9 Block 5 | SPHEREx & PUNCHSpXSUCCESS
- 2024Electron | Owl Night Long (StriX-3)RLSUCCESS
- 2023Proton-M Briz-M | Olymp-K #2 (Luch 5X)KhSCSUCCESS
- 2000Zenit | ICO F1SLFAILURE
- 2000Taurus 1110 | MTIOSCSUCCESS
- 2000Proton-K/DM-2M | Ekspress 6AKhSCSUCCESS
- 1991Kosmos-3M | Nadezhda 6CCCPSUCCESS
- 1983Proton-K/DM | EkranCCCPSUCCESS
- 1981Soyuz-U | Soyuz T-4CCCPSUCCESS
- 1979Soyuz U | Progress 5CCCPSUCCESS
- 1976Kosmos-3M | Taifun-1 4CCCPSUCCESS
- 1975Voskhod | Zenit-4MK 38CCCPSUCCESS
- 1972Thor Delta N | TD-1AUSAFSUCCESS
- 1965Atlas SLV-3 Agena D | KH-7 16USAFSUCCESS
- 1965Molniya 8K78 | Luna-5cCCCPFAILURE
- 1964Nike Cajun | Trailblazer PelletNASASUCCESS
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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Cosmos — Carl Sagan
Still the best single argument for why any of this matters, and it leaves the arithmetic in. For a reader who wants the science, not just the awe.
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Pale Blue Dot — Carl Sagan
The case for leaving Earth, written by someone unsentimental about how hard that is. Suits readers who want the argument rather than the poster.
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Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir
Hard-SF problem solving in The Martian's key — for anyone who liked the engineering more than the peril. The only novel on this list.
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