Launches
ON RECORD12MISSIONS
11 of them succeeded. The earliest was in 1963 and the latest in 2024.
MARKED ON THIS DATE
1610 · 416 years ago today
Galileo sees moons at Jupiter
Galileo recorded three points of light beside Jupiter and watched them move, the first objects seen orbiting something other than Earth.
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ARCHIVE // DAY OF YEAR
January 7 in spaceflight
12 launches flew on January 7, the earliest of them in 1963, and 11 of them succeeded. Wikipedia lists 3 spaceflight and astronomy events on January 7. 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 1610.
Pictures from this date
NONE0IMAGES
There's no Astronomy Picture of the Day we can show for this date.
What happened on January 7
1610
Through his telescope, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei made the first observation of Jupiter's Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, although he was not able to distinguish the first two until the following night.
Galileo Galilei ↗1968
Surveyor program: Surveyor 7, the last spacecraft in the Surveyor series, lifts off from Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 36A.
Surveyor program ↗1985
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launches Sakigake, Japan's first interplanetary spacecraft and the first deep space probe to be launched by any country other than the United States or the Soviet Union.
JAXA ↗
Launches on January 7Archive read 2026-11-05. Anything after that isn't listed here.
12 launches
ONLINE
- 2024Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 6-35SpXSUCCESS
- 2020Long March 3B | TJS-5 (TJSW-5)CASCSUCCESS
- 2020Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink 2SpXSUCCESS
- 1998Athena II | Lunar ProspectorLMTSUCCESS
- 1985Mu-3S-II | SakigakeISASSUCCESS
- 1982Kosmos-3M | Strela-2M 26CCCPSUCCESS
- 1978Atlas SLV-3D Centaur | Intelsat-4A 3USAFSUCCESS
- 1976Voskhod | Zenit-4MK 54CCCPSUCCESS
- 1968Atlas SLV-3C Centaur | Surveyor 7USAFSUCCESS
- 1966Vostok 8A92 | Zenit-2 33CCCPSUCCESS
- 1966Thor Burner 1 | DSAP-2 F2USAFFAILURE
- 1963Thor Agena D | KH-4 18USAFSUCCESS
FIELD KIT / LIBRARY
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LISTING
Cosmos, by Carl Sagan
Sagan's tour of the universe and how we came to understand it. It keeps the science in.
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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.
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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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LINKS AMAZON.COM
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.