Launches
ON RECORD2MISSIONS
2 of them succeeded. The earliest was in 1990 and the latest in 2024.
ARCHIVE // DAY OF YEAR
January 1 in spaceflight
2 launches flew on January 1, the earliest of them in 1990, and 2 of them succeeded. Wikipedia lists 3 spaceflight and astronomy events on January 1. Pick another date to see what happened on it.
Recorded events
IN THE RECORD3ENTRIES
Spaceflight and astronomy entries from Wikipedia for this date, oldest first, starting in 1801.
Pictures from this date
NONE0IMAGES
There's no Astronomy Picture of the Day we can show for this date.
What happened on January 1
1801
Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the dwarf planet Ceres, naming it after the Roman goddess of agriculture and of motherly love.
Giuseppe Piazzi ↗1801
Ceres, the largest and first known object in the Asteroid belt, is discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi.
Ceres (dwarf planet) ↗2019
The NASA space probe New Horizons flew by the trans-Neptunian object Arrokoth, making it the farthest object visited by a spacecraft.
NASA ↗
Launches on January 1Archive read 2026-11-05. Anything after that isn't listed here.
2 launches
ONLINE
- 2024PSLV-DL | XPoSatISROSUCCESS
- 1990Commercial Titan III | Skynet 4A & JCSat 2MMSUCCESS
FIELD KIT / LIBRARY
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- VIEW
LISTING
Cosmos, by Carl Sagan
Sagan's tour of the universe and how we came to understand it. It keeps the science in.
- VIEW
LISTING
Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan
Sagan's case for people leaving Earth one day, and an honest look at how hard that would be.
- VIEW
LISTING
Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir
A science-fiction novel from the author of The Martian, built around solving one engineering problem after another.
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Sources and licences
Event text and thumbnails come from Wikipedia and are used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Images come only from Wikimedia Commons, which doesn't accept non-free content. Each thumbnail links to its file page, which lists its licence and author.
Launch records are from The Space Devs’ Launch Library 2. Pictures are NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. Many of them belong to the photographer or a partner agency, so we only show the ones credited to NASA alone.