Launches
ON RECORD20MISSIONS
20 of them reached orbit. The earliest was 1961, the most recent 2025.
ARCHIVE // DAY OF YEAR
October 19 in spaceflight
20 orbital launches flew on October 19, the earliest of them in 1961, and 20 reached orbit. Wikipedia records 1 spaceflight and astronomy event on October 19. Below are the pictures NASA published on October 19 in 5 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 2017 onward.
Pictures from this date
PUBLISHED5IMAGES
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for October 19, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.
Published on October 19
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, for this calendar date in each of the last several years.
2025
Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko Creates Its Tails
Where do comet tails come from? There are usually no obvious places on the nuclei of comets from which the jets that create comet tails emanate. One of the best images of emerging jets is shown in the featured picture, taken in 2015 by ESA's robotic Rosetta spacecraft that orbited Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (Comet CG) from 2014 to 2016. The picture shows plumes of gas and dust escaping numerous places from Comet CG's nucleus as it neared the Sun and heated up. The comet has two prominent lobes, the larger one spanning about 4 kilometers, and a smaller 2.5-kilometer lobe connected by a narrow neck. Analyses indicate that evaporation must be taking place well inside the comet's surface to create the jets of gas, dust, and ice that we see emitted through the surface. Comet CG (also known as Comet 67P) loses in jets about a meter of surface depth during each of its 6.44-year orbits around the Sun, a rate at which will completely destroy the comet in only thousands of years. In 2016, Rosetta's mission ended with a controlled impact onto Comet CG's surface.
NASA · public domain
2024
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS Flys Away
These six panels follow daily apparitions of comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS as it moved away from our fair planet during the past week. The images were taken with the same camera and lens at the indicated dates and locations from California, planet Earth. At far right on October 12 the visitor from the distant Oort cloud was near its closest approach, some 70 million kilometers (about 4 light-minutes) away. Its bright coma and long dust tail were close on the sky to the setting Sun but still easy to spot against a bright western horizon. Over the following days, the outbound comet steadily climbs above the ecliptic and north into the darker western evening sky, but begins to fade from view. Crossing the Earth's orbital plane around October 14, Tsuchinshan-ATLAS exhibits a noticeable antitail extended toward the western horizon. Higher in the evening sky at sunset by October 17 (far left) the comet has faded and reached a distance of around 77 million kilometers from planet Earth. Hopefully you enjoyed some of Tsuchinshan-ATLAS's bid to become the best comet of 2024. This comet's initial orbital period estimates were a mere 80,000 years, but in fact it may never return to the inner Solar System. Growing Gallery: Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS in 2024
© Xingyang Cai — used with the credit NASA publishes
2023
A Sunrise at Sunset Point
This timelapse series captured on October 14 is set against the sunrise view from Sunset Point, Bryce Canyon, planet Earth. Of course on that date the New Moon caught up with the Sun in the canyon's morning skies. Local temperatures fell as the Moon's shadow swept across the high altitude scene and the brilliant morning sunlight became a more subdued yellow hue cast over the reddish rocky landscape. In the timelapse series, images were taken at 2 minute intervals. The camera and solar filter were fixed to a tripod to follow the phases of the annular solar eclipse. APOD Album: Annular Solar Eclipse of 2023 October
© Martin Ratcliffe — used with the credit NASA publishes
2022
A Galaxy Beyond Stars, Gas, Dust
Do we dare believe our eyes? When we look at images of space, we often wonder whether they are "real", and just as often the best answer varies. In this case, the scene appears much as our eyes would see it, because it was obtained using RGB (Red, Green, Blue) filters like the cone cells in our eyes, except collecting light for 19 hours, not a fraction of a second. The featured image was captured over six nights, using a 24-inch diameter telescope in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, in California, USA. The bright spiral galaxy at the center (NGC 7497) looks like it is being grasped by an eerie tendril of a space ghost, and therein lies the trick. The galaxy is actually 59 million light years away, while the nebulosity is MBM 54, less than one thousand light years away, making it one of the nearest cool clouds of gas and dust -- galactic cirrus -- within our own Milky Way Galaxy. Both are in the constellation of Pegasus, which can be seen high overhead from northern latitudes in the autumn.
© Howard Trottier; Text: Emily Rice — used with the credit NASA publishes
2021
Palomar 6: Globular Star Cluster
Where did this big ball of stars come from? Palomar 6 is one of about 200 globular clusters of stars that survive in our Milky Way Galaxy. These spherical star-balls are older than our Sun as well as older than most stars that orbit in our galaxy's disk. Palomar 6 itself is estimated to be about 12.5 billion years old, so old that it is close to -- and so constrains -- the age of the entire universe. Containing about 500,000 stars, Palomar 6 lies about 25,000 light years away, but not very far from our galaxy's center. At that distance, this sharp image from the Hubble Space Telescope spans about 15 light-years. After much study including images from Hubble, a leading origin hypothesis is that Palomar 6 was created -- and survives today -- in the central bulge of stars that surround the Milky Way's center, not in the distant galactic halo where most other globular clusters are now found.
NASA · public domain
What happened on October 19
2017
Canadian astronomer Robert Weryk discovered ʻOumuamua (depicted), the first known interstellar object detected passing through the Solar System.
Robert Weryk ↗
Every launch on October 19
20 launches
ONLINE
- 2025Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 11-19SpXSUCCESS
- 2025Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 10-17SpXSUCCESS
- 2025Kinetica 1 | PRSC-HS1 & AIRSAT-03/04CASSUCCESS
- 2016Soyuz-FG | Soyuz MS-02RFSASUCCESS
- 2011Proton-M / Briz-M Enhanced | ViaSat-1ILSSUCCESS
- 2010Soyuz-2.1a/Fregat | 6 x Globalstar-2SSASUCCESS
- 2008Pegasus XL | Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX)OSCSUCCESS
- 2006Soyuz 2.1a/Fregat | METOP ARFSASUCCESS
- 2005Titan 404B | NROL-20USAFSUCCESS
- 2004Long March 3A | Feng Yun 2CCASCSUCCESS
- 1999Ariane 44LP | Orion 2ASASUCCESS
- 1995Ariane 42L | Astra 1EASASUCCESS
- 1983Ariane 1 | Intelsat 507ASASUCCESS
- 1982Kosmos-3M | Parus 35CCCPSUCCESS
- 1973Molniya-M | Molniya-2 7CCCPSUCCESS
- 1971Kosmos 11K63 | DS-P1-Yu 46CCCPSUCCESS
- 1968Tsiklon-2A | I2M 2CCCPSUCCESS
- 1967Scout B | RAM C-1NASASUCCESS
- 1965Kosmos 11K63 | DS-U2-V 1CCCPSUCCESS
- 1961Scout X-1 | P-21NASASUCCESS
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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General-audience astronomy and spaceflight — none of it a textbook.
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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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