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March 31 in spaceflight

27 orbital launches flew on March 31, the earliest of them in 1966, and 26 reached orbit. Wikipedia records 5 spaceflight and astronomy events on March 31. Below are the pictures NASA published on March 31 in 6 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.

Launches

ON RECORD

27MISSIONS

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

Recorded events

IN THE RECORD

5ENTRIES

Spaceflight and astronomy entries from Wikipedia's record of this date, oldest first — from 1966 onward.

Pictures from this date

PUBLISHED

6IMAGES

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for March 31, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.

Published on March 31

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

Uranus's Largest Moon: Titania

2026

Uranus's Largest Moon: Titania

Titania's tortured terrain is a mix of canyons, cliffs, and craters. NASA's interplanetary robot spacecraft Voyager 2 passed the largest moon of Uranus in 1986 and took the feature picture. That the trenches of Titania resemble those on another moon of Uranus, Ariel, indicate that Titania underwent some violent surface event possibly related to water freezing and expanding in its distant past. Although Titania is Uranus's largest moon, it is only about half the radius of Triton - the largest moon of Uranus's sister planet Neptune, which itself is slightly smaller than Earth's Moon. Titania, discovered by William Herschel in 1787, is essentially a large dirty iceball that is composed of about half water-ice and half rock. There is recent speculation that radioactive heating melts some underground ice into oceans.

NASA · public domain

Parker: The Solar System from Near the Sun

2025

Parker: The Solar System from Near the Sun

If you watch long enough, a comet will appear. Before then, you will see our Solar System from inside the orbit of Mercury as recorded by NASA's Parker Solar Probe looping around the Sun. The video captures coronal streamers into the solar wind, a small Coronal Mass Ejection, and planets including, in order of appearance, Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter. Between the emergence of Earth and Mars, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS appears with a distinctive tail. The continuous fleeting streaks are high energy particles from the Sun impacting Parker's sideways looking camera. The featured time-lapse video was taken last year during Encounter 21, Parker's 21st close approach to the Sun. Studying data and images from Parker are delivering a better understanding of the dynamic Sun's effects on Earth's space weather as well as humanity's power grids, spacecraft, and space-faring astronauts. Growing Gallery: Partial Solar Eclipse of 2025 March

NASA · public domain

Total Solar Eclipse Below the Bottom of the World

2024

Total Solar Eclipse Below the Bottom of the World

In late 2021 there was a total solar eclipse visible only at the end of the Earth. To capture the unusual phenomenon, airplanes took flight below the clouded seascape of Southern Ocean. The featured image shows one relatively spectacular capture where the bright spot is the outer corona of the Sun and the eclipsing Moon is seen as the dark spot in the center. A wing and engine of the airplane are visible across the left and bottom of the image, while another airplane observing the eclipse is visible on the far left. The dark area of the sky surrounding the eclipsed Sun is called a shadow cone. It is dark because you are looking down a long corridor of air shadowed by the Moon. A careful inspection of the eclipsed Sun will reveal the planet Mercury just to the right. You won't have to travel to the end of the Earth to see the next total solar eclipse. The total eclipse path will cross North America on 2024 April 8, just over one week from today. NASA Coverage: Total Solar Eclipse of 2024 April 8

© Petr Horálek (ESO Photo Ambassador, Inst. of Physics in Opava) ; Acknowledgement: Xavier Jubier — used with the credit NASA publishes

Seeing Titan

2023

Seeing Titan

Shrouded in a thick atmosphere, Saturn's largest moon Titan really is hard to see. Small particles suspended in the upper atmosphere cause an almost impenetrable haze, strongly scattering light at visible wavelengths and hiding Titan's surface features from prying eyes. But Titan's surface is better imaged at infrared wavelengths where scattering is weaker and atmospheric absorption is reduced. Arrayed around this visible light image (center) of Titan are some of the clearest global infrared views of the tantalizing moon so far. In false color, the six panels present a consistent processing of 13 years of infrared image data from the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) on board the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn from 2004 to 2017. They offer a stunning comparison with Cassini's visible light view. NASA's revolutionary rotorcraft mission to Titan is due to launch in 2027.

NASA · public domain

Exploring the Antennae

2022

Exploring the Antennae

Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies are colliding. Stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, very rarely collide in the course of the ponderous cataclysm that lasts for hundreds of millions of years. But the galaxies' large clouds of molecular gas and dust often do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. Spanning over 500 thousand light-years, this stunning view also reveals new star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational tidal forces. The remarkably sharp ground-based image, an accumulation of 88 hours of exposure captured during 2012-2021, follows the faint tidal tails and distant background galaxies in the field of view. The suggestive overall visual appearance of the extended arcing structures gives the galaxy pair, also known as Arp 244, its popular name - The Antennae.

© Dietmar Hager — used with the credit NASA publishes

M87's Central Black Hole in Polarized Light

2021

M87's Central Black Hole in Polarized Light

To play on Carl Sagan’s famous words "If you wish to make black hole jets, you must first create magnetic fields." The featured image represents the detected intrinsic spin direction (polarization) of radio waves. The polarizationi is produced by the powerful magnetic field surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of elliptical galaxy M87. The radio waves were detected by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which combines data from radio telescopes distributed worldwide. The polarization structure, mapped using computer generated flow lines, is overlaid on EHT’s famous black hole image, first published in 2019. The full 3-D magnetic field is complex. Preliminary analyses indicate that parts of the field circle around the black hole along with the accreting matter, as expected. However, another component seemingly veers vertically away from the black hole. This component could explain how matter resists falling in and is instead launched into M87’s jet.

NASA · public domain

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What happened on March 31

  1. 1966

    The Soviet Union launches Luna 10 which later becomes the first space probe to enter orbit around the Moon.

    Soviet Union ↗

  2. 1970

    Explorer 1 re-enters the Earth's atmosphere after 12 years in orbit.

    Explorer 1 ↗

  3. 2005

    The dwarf planet Makemake is discovered by a team led by astronomer Michael E. Brown at the Palomar Observatory.

    Dwarf planet ↗

  4. 2016

    NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko return to Earth after a yearlong mission at the International Space Station.

    NASA ↗

  5. 2023

    A tornado caused the collapse of a venue hosting a sold-out concert in Belvidere, Illinois, United States, resulting in one death and 48 injuries.

    Belvidere Apollo Theatre collapse ↗

Every launch on March 31

27 launches

ONLINE
  1. 2025Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 6-80SpXSUCCESS
  2. 2024Soyuz 2.1b | Resurs-P No.4RFSASUCCESS
  3. 2024Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 6-45SpXSUCCESS
  4. 2023Long March 4C | Yaogan 34-04CASCSUCCESS
  5. 2022New Shepard | NS-20BOSUCCESS
  6. 2019Long March 3B/E | Tianlian 2-01CASCSUCCESS
  7. 2018Long March 4C | Gaofen 1-02, 1-03 & 1-04CASCSUCCESS
  8. 2016Soyuz 2.1a | Progress MS-02 (63P)RFSASUCCESS
  9. 2015Rokot / Briz-KM | Gonets M-21, Gonets M-22, Gonets M-23, Kosmos 2504VKOSUCCESS
  10. 2014Long March 2C | Shijian 11-06CASCSUCCESS
  11. 2012Long March 3B/E | APStar-7CASCSUCCESS
  12. 2003Delta II | GPS IIR-9USAFSUCCESS
  13. 1993Soyuz-U2 | Progress M-17RFSASUCCESS
  14. 1991Proton | Almaz-1CCCPSUCCESS
  15. 1988Proton-K/DM | Gorizont 15CCCPSUCCESS
  16. 1987Proton | KvantCCCPSUCCESS
  17. 1983Soyuz U | Zenit-6U 75CCCPSUCCESS
  18. 1982Vostok 8A92M | Tselina-D 34CCCPSUCCESS
  19. 1982Kosmos-3M | Tselina-O 41CCCPSUCCESS
  20. 1981Molniya-M | US-K 20CCCPSUCCESS
  21. 1979Soyuz U | Zenit-2M 96CCCPSUCCESS
  22. 1978Atlas SLV-3D Centaur | Intelsat-4A 6USAFSUCCESS
  23. 1978Kosmos-3M | Tsikada 4CCCPSUCCESS
  24. 1976Soyuz 11A511M | Zenit-4MT 10CCCPSUCCESS
  25. 1972Molniya-M | Venera-9aCCCPFAILURE
  26. 1966Molniya-M | Luna-10CCCPSUCCESS
  27. 1966Thor Burner 1 | DSAP-2 F3USAFSUCCESS

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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