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December 31 in spaceflight
Wikipedia records 3 spaceflight and astronomy events on December 31. Below are the pictures NASA published on December 31 in 5 different years — each one taken or released on this exact date.
Recorded events
IN THE RECORD3ENTRIES
Spaceflight and astronomy entries from Wikipedia's record of this date, oldest first — from 1951 onward.
Pictures from this date
PUBLISHED5IMAGES
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for December 31, one per year. Some are public domain and some belong to the photographer — each says which.
Published on December 31
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, for this calendar date in each of the last several years.
2025
HH-222: The Waterfall Nebula
What created the Waterfall Nebula? The origin is still being researched. The structure, officially designated Herbig-Haro 222, appears in the region of NGC 1999 in the Great Orion Molecular Cloud complex. The elongated gaseous stream stretches about ten light years but appears similar to a long waterfall on Earth. Recent observations indicate that HH-222 is likely a gigantic gaseous bow shock, similar to a wave of water caused by a fast-moving ship. The origin of this shock wave is thought to be a jet outflow from the multiple star system V380 Orionis off the lower left of the frame. Therefore, gas does not flow along the waterfall, but rather the entire structure moves toward the upper right. The Waterfall Nebula lies about 1,500 light years away toward the constellation of Orion. The featured image was captured earlier this month from El Sauce Observatory in Chile. Jigsaw Nebula: Astronomy Puzzle of the Day
© Mike Selby — used with the credit NASA publishes
2024
The Twisted Disk of NGC 4753
What do you think this is? Here’s a clue: it's bigger than a bread box. Much bigger. The answer is that pictured NGC 4753 is a twisted disk galaxy, where unusual dark dust filaments provide clues about its history. No one is sure what happened, but a leading model holds that a relatively normal disk galaxy gravitationally ripped apart a dusty satellite galaxy while its precession distorted the plane of the accreted debris as it rotated. The cosmic collision is hypothesized to have started about a billion years ago. NGC 4753 is seen from the side, and possibly would look like a normal spiral galaxy from the top. The bright orange halo is composed of many older stars that might trace dark matter. The featured Hubble image was recently reprocessed to highlight ultraviolet and red-light emissions. APOD Year in Review: NASA Night Sky Network Presentation for 2024
NASA · public domain
2023
Illustris: A Simulation of the Universe
How did we get here? Click play, sit back, and watch. A computer simulation of the evolution of the universe provides insight into how galaxies formed and perspectives into humanity's place in the universe. The Illustris project exhausted 20 million CPU hours in 2014 following 12 billion resolution elements spanning a cube 35 million light years on a side as it evolved over 13 billion years. The simulation tracks matter into the formation of a wide variety of galaxy types. As the virtual universe evolves, some of the matter expanding with the universe soon gravitationally condenses to form filaments, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies. The featured video takes the perspective of a virtual camera circling part of this changing universe, first showing the evolution of dark matter, then hydrogen gas coded by temperature (0:45), then heavy elements such as helium and carbon (1:30), and then back to dark matter (2:07). On the lower left the time since the Big Bang is listed, while on the lower right the type of matter being shown is listed. Explosions (0:50) depict galaxy-center supermassive black holes expelling bubbles of hot gas. Interesting discrepancies between Illustris and the real universe have been studied, including why the simulation produced an overabundance of old stars.
NASA · public domain
2022
Moon over Makemake
Makemake (sounds like MAH-kay MAH-kay), second brightest dwarf planet of the Kuiper belt, has a moon. Nicknamed MK2, Makemake's moon reflects sunlight with a charcoal-dark surface, about 1,300 times fainter than its parent body. Still, in 2016 it was spotted in Hubble Space Telescope observations intended to search for faint companions with the same technique used to find the small satellites of Pluto. Just as for Pluto and its satellites, further observations of Makemake and orbiting moon will measure the system's mass and density and allow a broader understanding of the distant worlds. About 160 kilometers (100 miles) across compared to Makemake's 1,400 kilometer diameter, MK2's relative size and contrast are shown in this artist's vision. An imagined scene of an unexplored frontier of the Solar System, it looks back from a spacecraft's vantage as the dim Sun shines along the Milky Way. Of course, the Sun is over 50 times farther from Makemake than it is from planet Earth.
NASA · public domain
2021
JWST on the Road to L2
This timelapse gif tracks the James Webb Space Telescope as it streaks across the stars of Orion on its journey to a destination beyond the Moon. Recorded on December 28, 12 consecutive exposures each 10 minutes long were aligned and combined with a subsequent color image of the background stars to create the animation. About 2.5 days after its December 25 launch, JWST cruised past the altitude of the Moon's orbit as it climbed up the gravity ridge from Earth to reach a halo orbit around L2, an Earth-Sun Lagrange point. Lagrange points are convenient locations in space where the combined gravitational attraction of one massive body (Earth) orbiting another massive body (Sun) is in balance with the centripetal force needed to move along with them. So much smaller masses, like spacecraft, will tend to stay there. One of 5 Lagrange points, L2 is about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth directly along the Earth-Sun line. JWST will arrive at L2 on January 23, 29 days after launch. While relaxing in Earth's surface gravity you can follow the James Webb Space Telescope's progress and complicated deployment online.
© Malcolm Park — used with the credit NASA publishes
What happened on December 31
1951
Cold War: The Marshall Plan expires after distributing more than US$13.3 billion in foreign aid to rebuild Western Europe.
Cold War ↗
2011
NASA succeeds in putting the first of two Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory satellites in orbit around the Moon.
NASA ↗
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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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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