January 15 

15 January 1969

Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 crew. Left to right: Yeliseyev, Khrunov, Shatalov, Volynov

On January 15, 1969, Soyuz 5, with a crew of three cosmonauts: Boris Volynov (born 1934), Aleksey Yeliseyev (born 1934) and Yevgeniy Khrunov (1933–2000), was launched on a mission to rendezvous and manually dock with the Soyuz 4 spacecraft. The docking took place on January 16. After a crew transfer between the two spacecraft, Soyuz 5 returned to Earth carrying cosmonaut Volynov.

 

   During the reentry on January 18, the craft's service module failed to separate after retrofire, so it entered the atmosphere nose-first. As the craft aerobraked, the atmosphere burned through the module, but the descent module righted itself before the escape hatch was burned through. The parachute lines partially tangled and the landing rockets failed, resulting in a hard landing which broke some of Volynov's teeth. Because of the ballistic descent, the landing took place around 600 kilometers short of the primary landing area.

Mission data:

Mission name: Soyuz 5

Crew at launch : Boris V. Volynov (Бори́с Валенти́нович Волы́нов) – Commander

                           Aleksei S. Yeliseyev (Алексей Станиславович Елисеев) – Flight engineer

                           Yevgeny V. Khrunov (Евге́ний Васи́льевич Хруно́в) – Research engineer

Crew at landing: Boris V. Volynov – Commander

                         

Spacecraft: Soyuz 7K-OK No. 13

Launch vehicle: Soyuz 11A511 (No. Ya15000-011)

Launch site: NIIP-5, LC1

Launch date and time: 15 January 1969, 07:04:57 UTC

Landing date and time: 18 January 1969, 07:59:12 UTC

Landing site: Ural Mountains at 200 km of the southeast of Kostanay, near Orenburg, Kazakhstan

Flight duration: 3 d 00 h 54 min 15 s

Cosmonauts Yeliseyev and Khrunov in training with spacesuits. Credit: SpaceFacts

Artist's impression of Soyuz 5 reentry with the decent module nose-first

© 2026, Andrew Mirecki

15 January 1973

Model of Lunokchod 2 rover

Luna 21 spacecraft, launched on January 8, 1973, landed in Le Monnier crater at 22:35 UT on January 15, 1973, delivering the Soviet Union’s second rover – Lunokhod 2 – to the lunar surface. The primary objectives of the mission were to collect images of the lunar surface, examine ambient light levels to determine the feasibility of astronomical observations from the Moon, perform laser ranging experiments from Earth, observe solar X-rays, measure local magnetic fields, and study mechanical properties of the lunar surface material. The total distance driven by the rover was 39.16 km and the last communication with it was on May 10, 1973. It returned 86 panoramas and over 80,000 navigational video pictures. The Lunokhod laser retroreflector is still used by Earth-based stations for laser ranging.

   The rover stood 135 cm high and had a mass of 840 kg. It was about 170 cm long and 160 cm wide and had 8 wheels, each with an independent suspension, motor and brake. The rover had two speeds, ~1 km/hr and ~2 km/hr. Lunokhod 2 was equipped with three TV cameras, one mounted high on the rover for navigation, which could return high resolution images at different rates (3.2, 5.7, 10.9 or 21.1 seconds per frame). These images were used by a five-man team of controllers on Earth who sent driving commands to the rover in real time. Power was supplied by a solar panel on the inside of a round hinged lid which covered the instrument bay, which would charge the batteries when opened. A polonium-210 isotopic heat source was used to keep the rover warm during the lunar nights. There were 4 panoramic cameras mounted on the rover. Scientific instruments included a soil mechanics tester, solar X-ray experiment, an astrophotometer to measure visible and UV light levels, a magnetometer deployed in front of the rover on the end of a 1.5 m boom, a radiometer, a photodetector (Rubin-1) for laser detection experiments, and a French-supplied laser corner-reflector. The launch mass was 4850 kg. The lander and rover together weighed 1814 kg.

Luna 21 lander seen by Lunokhod 2

   Proton-K with Blok D launch vehicle put the spacecraft into Earth parking orbit followed by translunar injection. Luna 21 entered orbit around the Moon on January 12, 1973, after a single mid-course correction en route. Parameters were 110 × 90 kilometers at 60° inclination. On 13 and 14 January, the perilune was lowered to 16 km altitude. On 15 January after 40 orbits, the braking rocket was fired at 16 km altitude, and the craft went into free fall. At an altitude of 750 meters the main thrusters began firing, slowing the fall until a height of 22 meters was reached. At this point the main thrusters shut down and the secondary thrusters ignited, slowing the fall until the lander was 1.5 meters above the surface, where the engine was cut off. Landing occurred at 23:35 UT in LeMonnier crater at 25.9994 degrees N, 30.4076 degrees E, between Mare Serenitatis and the Taurus Mountains. The lander carried a bas relief of Lenin and the Soviet coat-of-arms.

   After landing, the Lunokhod 2 took TV images of the surrounding area, then rolled down a ramp to the surface at 01:14 UT on 16 January 1973 and took pictures of the Luna 21 lander and landing site. It stopped and charged batteries until 18 January, took more images of the lander and landing site, and then set out over the Moon. The rover would run during the lunar day, stopping occasionally to recharge its batteries via the solar panels. At night the rover would hibernate until the next sunrise, heated by the radioactive source.

   The rover started generally moving due south for 5 km over a mare region and then into a hilly, highland-type area. It them moved east over a mare plain. It reached a long north-south trending rille, at which point it turned south and then north along the rille. Lunokhod 2 operated for about 4 months, covered 37 km of terrain including hilly upland areas and rilles, and sent back 86 panoramic images and over 80,000 TV pictures. Many mechanical tests of the surface, laser ranging measurements, and other experiments were completed during this time.

Lunar surface panorama taken by Lunokhod 2. Credit: Russian Academy of Sciences/V.I. Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry

   On 20 April 1973, Lunokhod 2 drove into a small crater. When it drove back out, it did not close the lid. Apparently the lid scraped the wall of the crater and deposited dust on its inner surface. The lid was closed at the end of the lunar day, and the soil in the lid was dumped into the interior of the rover. When the lid was opened for the next lunar day, the dust on the radiator caused the rover to overheat, and on 10 May communications ceased. On June 4 it was announced that the program was completed. The Lunokhod laser retroreflector is still used by Earth-based stations for laser ranging, Lunokhod 2 is located at 25.8323 N, 30.9222 E. 

Lunokhod 2 on the Moon. Soviet podtcard from 1975 with a painting by Andrei Sokolov (1931–2007)

© 2026, Andrew Mirecki

15 January 1976

Engineers inspect the Helios 2 spacecraft. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The German-NASA Helios 2 spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral on January 15, 1976. It was the second of a pair of deep-space probes developed by the Federal Republic of Germany in a cooperative program with NASA. The probe achieved perihelion on April 17, 1976, at a distance of 43.432 million kilometers (0.29 au) from the Sun, the closest flyby of the Sun until Parker Solar Probe mission in 2018. The spacecraft provided important information on solar plasma, the solar wind, cosmic rays, and cosmic dust, and also performed magnetic field and electrical field experiments.

   Besides its investigation of the Sun and solar environment, both Helios 1 and Helios 2 observed the dust and ion tails of at least three comets, C/1975V1 West, C/1978H1 Meier, and C/1979Y1 Bradfield. Helios 2’s downlink transmitter, however, failed on March 3, 1980 and no further usable data was received from the spacecraft. Ground controllers shut down the spacecraft on January 7, 1981 to preclude any possible radio interference with other spacecraft in the future.

   Experiments were provided by scientists from both FRG and the U.S. NASA supplied the Titan/Centaur launch vehicle. The spacecraft was equipped with two booms and a 32-m electric dipole. The payload consisted of a fluxgate magnetometer; electric and magnetic wave experiments, which covered various bands in the frequency range 6 Hz to 3 MHz; charged particle experiments, which covered various energy ranges starting with solar wind thermal energies and extending to 1 GeV; a zodiacal light experiment; and a micrometeoroid experiment. The purpose of the mission was to make pioneering measurements of the interplanetary medium from the vicinity of the earth's orbit to 0.3 au. The spacecraft was spin stabilized with the spin axis normal to the ecliptic, and a nominal spin rate of 1 rps. The outer surface was coated with a conductive material, resulting in a plasma-sheath potential of typically 5 eV. Sheath-related coupling caused by the spacecraft antennae produced interference with the wave experiments, but the character of the interference was different from that observed on the Helios-A spacecraft. The spacecraft was capable of being operated at bit rates of from 4096 to 8 bps.

Launch of  the Titan IIIE-Centaur launch vehicle with Helios 2. Credit: San Diego Air & Space Museum/edit. Andrzej Mirecki

© 2026, Andrew Mirecki

15 January 2006

Stardust capsule on the ground. Credit: NASA

On January 15, 2006, the Sample Return Capsule from the Stardust spacecraft returned to Earth with more than 10,000 particles larger than 1 micrometer, collected from the coma of comet Wild 2 (81P/Wild) and from interstellar dust. Launched on February 7, 1999, Stardust flew by the short-period comet on January 2, 2004. The primary goal of the flyby was to collect samples of the coma and return them to Earth.

   The capsule separated from the main craft (with a stabilizing spin of 1.5 rpm) on January 15, 2006, at 5:57 UT and entered the atmosphere four hours later at 9:57 UT. An aeroshell slowed the capsule down initially for about ten minutes, the drogue parachute was deployed at 10:00 UT and the main parachute 5 minutes later at an altitude of roughly 3 km. The capsule landed at 10:10 UT within a 30 x 84 km landing ellipse at the U.S. Air Force Test and Training Range in the Utah desert. High winds caused the capsule to drift about 5 miles north of its entry ground track, but with the aid of a locator beacon the capsule was found at 10:54 UT and was later transported by helicopter to a clean room, arriving at about 13:00 UT. Then, it was transferred to the Planetary Materials Curatorial facility at Johnson Space Center in Houston. There, scientists began a long search for traces of tiny particles in the aerogel. 

  

Stardust capsule reentry into the atmosphere. Credit: NASA

   According to Dr. Donald Brownlee, the principal investigator for Stardust:

"It was the middle of the night in a very isolated Utah location. The entry of the capsule was a wonder. It was [a] glowing red fireball with a luminous tail coming in from the west. It was coming down and getting closer but viewed from ground zero it oddly climbed up in the sky. People near Wendover heard the sonic boom and a NASA aircraft got spectacular images as did a film crew from Japan on the ground. I was outside to see the fireball and then inside to watch images from tracking devices. It landed in the dark and it took several hours to find it. It was found by our helicopter crew and returned to a special cleanroom facility prepared for it where it was inspected and prepared for [a] flight the next day to the Johnson Space Center in Houston."   

– Doug Adler. "Stardust: The mission that forever changed our understanding of comets". Astronomy. January 15, 2022

Stardust's capsule is being lifted at the landing site. Credit: NASA

Donald Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator with the University of Washington, flashes a victory sign for the successful arrival of Stardust material. Also pictured are JSC's Mike Zolensky (left), curator and co-investigator for the project; Friedrich Horz, JSC, and Peter Tsou, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Credit: NASA

   The major finding of the analysis of the comet dust particles was that the rocky components of the comet, most of its total mass, formed at hot temperatures above 1000 degrees Celsius, but some of the ice formed at near absolute zero temperatures. Many of the materials in the comet have also been found in meteorites. Comet Wild 2 is a broader mix of components suggesting that materials from a broad range of locations were transported out beyond Pluto where the comet formed. The comet rocky silicate materials formed first, then assembled with ice and organics in a drastically colder place. This proved that the formation of comet dust and ice was clearly decoupled. The samples proved that the outer solar system was not isolated from the inner solar system, and that materials were clearly mixing over regions from near the Sun to regions beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Comet particle tracks in aerogel of Stardust spacecraft. Credit: NASA

   The main spacecraft was diverted so as not to reenter Earth's atmosphere and remained in orbit around the Sun. It flew by Earth again for a gravity assist on January 14,  2009, and was funded for an extended mission to fly by Comet Tempel 1 on February 14, 2011, the New Exploration of Tempel 1 (NExT) mission, the spacecraft itself now generally referred to as Stardust/NExT.

Stardust Sample Return Capsule on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. NASA transferred the capsule to the Museum in 2008.

Link to the Stardust Reentry video taken from a NASA DC-8 aircraft

© 2026, Andrew Mirecki

15 January 2025

Blue Ghost Mission 1 lander. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

On January 15, 2025, at 06:11:39 UT, two robotic lunar landers — Blue Ghost Mission 1 and Hakuto-R Mission 2  (Resilience) — were launched together on a Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center. 

   Blue Ghost Mission 1, developed and operated by Firefly Aerospace as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, successfully landed in Mare Crisium near Mons Latreille on March 2, 2025. The lander then completed more than 14 days of surface operations (346 hours of daylight) and just over 5 hours of operations into the lunar night, until March 16, 2025.

Hakuto-R Mission 2, developed by the Japanese company ispace, crashed on the Moon during landing attempt on June 5, 2025.

Artist's rendering of Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander, as it would appear if it landed successfully. Credit: ispace

© 2026, Andrew Mirecki