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March 30 in spaceflight
Wikipedia records 2 spaceflight and astronomy events on March 30. Below are the pictures NASA published on March 30 in 6 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.
Recorded events
IN THE RECORD2ENTRIES
Spaceflight and astronomy entries from Wikipedia's record of this date, oldest first — from 1982 onward.
Pictures from this date
PUBLISHED6IMAGES
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for March 30, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.
Published on March 30
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, for this calendar date in each of the last several years.
2026
Peculiar Elliptical Galaxy Centaurus A
What's happened to the center of this galaxy? Dramatic dust lanes run across the center of unusual elliptical galaxy Centaurus A. These dust lanes are so thick they almost completely obscure the galaxy's center in visible light. This is particularly unusual as Cen A's older stars and oval shape are characteristic of a giant elliptical galaxy, a galaxy type typically low in dark dust. Pictured in this deep image is a complex network of foreground gas and dust, as well as shells of dim stars and a jet projecting to the upper right. Also known as NGC 5128, Cen A is surely the result of a galactic collision where many young dust-creating stars were formed. However, details of the creation of Cen A's unusually active center and iconic central dust lanes are still being researched. Cen A lies only 13 million light years away, making it the closest active galaxy. Jigsaw Galaxy: Astronomy Puzzle of the Day
© SADR Observatory Team: J-C Dalouzy, P. Bazart, M. Dherbécourt, C. Humbert, G. Leroy, J-P Quéau, H. Talbot, & E. Valin — used with the credit NASA publishes
2025
A Partial Solar Eclipse over Iceland
What if the Sun and Moon rose together? That happened yesterday over some northern parts of planet Earth as a partial solar eclipse occurred shortly after sunrise. Regions that experienced the Moon blocking part of the Sun included northeastern parts of North America and northwestern parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The featured image was captured yesterday over the Grábrók volcanic crater in Iceland where much of the Sun became momentarily hidden behind the Moon. The image was taken through a cloudy sky but so well planned that the photographer's friend appeared to be pulling the Sun out from behind the Moon. No part of the Earth experienced a total solar eclipse this time. In the distant past, some of humanity was so surprised when an eclipse occurred that ongoing battles suddenly stopped. Today, eclipses are not a surprise and are predicted with an accuracy of seconds. Growing Gallery: Partial Solar Eclipse of 2025 March
© Wioleta Gorecka — used with the credit NASA publishes
2024
Medieval Astronomy from Melk Abbey
Discovered by accident, this manuscript page provides graphical insight to astronomy in medieval times, before the Renaissance and the influence of Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo. The intriguing page is from lecture notes on astronomy compiled by the monk Magister Wolfgang de Styria before the year 1490. The top panels clearly illustrate the necessary geometry for a lunar (left) and solar eclipse in the Earth-centered Ptolemaic system. At lower left is a diagram of the Ptolemaic view of the Solar System with text at the upper right to explain the movement of the planets according to Ptolemy's geocentric model. At the lower right is a chart to calculate the date of Easter Sunday in the Julian calendar. The illustrated manuscript page was found at historic Melk Abbey in Austria.
© Library of Melk Abbey, Frag. 229 — used with the credit NASA publishes
2023
NGC 4372 and the Dark Doodad
The delightful Dark Doodad Nebula drifts through southern skies, a tantalizing target for binoculars toward the small constellation Musca, The Fly. The dusty cosmic cloud is seen against rich starfields just south of the Coalsack Nebula and the Southern Cross. Stretching for about 3 degrees across the center of this telephoto field of view, the Dark Doodad is punctuated near its southern tip (upper right) by yellowish globular star cluster NGC 4372. Of course NGC 4372 roams the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy, a background object some 20,000 light-years away and only by chance along our line-of-sight to the Dark Doodad. The Dark Doodad's well defined silhouette belongs to the Musca molecular cloud, but its better known alliterative moniker was first coined by astro-imager and writer Dennis di Cicco in 1986 while observing Comet Halley from the Australian outback. The Dark Doodad is around 700 light-years distant and over 30 light-years long.
© Matias Tomasello — used with the credit NASA publishes
2022
Animation: Odd Radio Circles
What do you call a cosmic puzzle that no one expected to see? In this case, Odd Radio Circles, aka ORCs. ORC-1 typifies the enigmatic five objects, only visible at radio frequencies, that were serendipitously discovered in 2019 using the new Australian SKA Pathfinder radio array. The final image in the featured video uses 2021 data from the South African MeerKAT array to reveal more detail. The radio data, assigned turquoise colors, are combined with a Dark Energy Survey optical/IR map. The animated artist’s illustration explores just one idea about the ORCs’ origins. If two supermassive black holes merge in the center of a galaxy, the associated shockwaves could generate rings of radio radiation. These grow to fill the video frame. The video zooms out so the expansion the ORC can be tracked until it is about a million light-years across. Fortunately, the up-coming Square Kilometer Array can help test this and other promising scenarios.
NASA · public domain
2021
Red Sprite Lightning over the Andes
What are those red filaments in the sky? They are a rarely seen form of lightning confirmed only about 30 years ago: red sprites. Recent research has shown that following a powerful positive cloud-to-ground lightning strike, red sprites may start as 100-meter balls of ionized air that shoot down from about 80-km high at 10 percent the speed of light. They are quickly followed by a group of upward streaking ionized balls. The featured image was taken earlier this year from Las Campanas observatory in Chile over the Andes Mountains in Argentina. Red sprites take only a fraction of a second to occur and are best seen when powerful thunderstorms are visible from the side. APOD via Instagram in: English, Indonesian, Persian, and Portuguese
© Yuri Beletsky (Carnegie Las Campanas Observatory, TWAN) — used with the credit NASA publishes
What happened on March 30
1982
Space Shuttle program: STS-3 mission is completed with the landing of Columbia at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.
Space Shuttle program ↗
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. This archive is still being mirrored, so some days are incomplete. 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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