February 14 

 

14 February 1972


Artist's depiction of a Ye-8-5 spacecraft

Luna 20, the second successful Soviet lunar sample-return mission, was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on February 14, 1972, at 03:27:58 UTC. The primary objective of the mission was to land on the Moon, collect lunar soil, and return it to Earth. The spacecraft entered lunar orbit on February 18, landed on the Moon on February 21, and its capsule returned to Earth on February 25, carrying 55 grams of collected lunar samples.

   Luna 20 was based on the Ye-8-5 spacecraft body, consisting of two attached stages, an ascent stage mounted on top of a descent stage. The lander stood 3.96 meters tall and had an unfueled landed mass of 1880 kg. With a full load of fuel Luna 20 launch mass was 5,725 kg.

   The descent stage was the same as the Ye-8 lower stage for the Lunokhod rovers, a cylindrical body with four protruding landing legs, fuel tanks, a landing radar altimeter, and a dual descent engine complex. The main descent rocket, the KTDU-417, was a throttleable 1920 kg thrust engine used for mid-course corrections, orbit insertion, braking for descent to the surface, and to slow the craft until it reached a cutoff point which was determined by the onboard computer based on altitude and velocity. After cutoff a bank of lower thrust (210 and 350 kg) vernier jets was used for the final landing. The descent stage also acted as a launch pad for the ascent stage. The spacecraft descent stage was equipped with a television camera, radiation and temperature monitors, telecommunications equipment, and a 90 cm extendable arm with a drilling rig for the collection of a lunar soil sample. Communications were via a conical antenna at the end of a boom at 768 and 922 MHz (downlink) and 115 MHz (uplink).

   The ascent stage was a smaller cylinder with a spherical top which replaced the Lunokhod rover and housing from the Ye-8 bus. It carried a cylindrical hermetically sealed soil sample container inside a spherical re-entry capsule, mounted on a 1920 kg thrust KRD-61 rocket. Total mass of the ascent stage was 520 kg, of which 245 kg was the nitric acid and UDMH propellant. It was 2 meters tall. The sample return cabin was 50 cm in diameter and had a mass of 39 kg. The KRD-61 could only fire once, for 53 seconds, to put it on a free return trajectory to Earth. Specific impulse of the engine was 313 seconds, it could impart a velocity of 2600 - 2700 m/s to the return craft.

See also: Luna 20 landing, Luna 20 return, Luna 16, Luna 18, Luna 24

© 2026, Andrew Mirecki

 

14 February 1980


Artist's rendering of the Solar Maximum Mission satellite in orbit. Credit: NASA

The Solar Maximum Mission (SMM) satellite was launched by a Delta rocket on February 14, 1980, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, into a circular orbit (altitude: 574 km) inclined 28.5 degrees to the equator. The satellite was designed to provide coordinated observations of solar activity, in particular solar flares, during a period of maximum solar activity. The payload was made up of seven instruments, specifically selected to study the short-wavelength and coronal manifestations of flares. Data were obtained on the storage and release of flare energy, particle acceleration, formation of hot plasma, and mass ejection. Complementary studies were made as part of the SMM guest investigator program, and coordinated in situ measurements of flare particle emissions were made from the ISEE 3 spacecraft.

The February 14, 1980 launch of SMM. Credit: NASA

   The SMM observatory was of modular construction and measured approximately 4 m in length, fitting into a circular envelope 2.3 m in diameter. It had  a mass of 2,315 kg. The instrument module occupied the top 2.3 m and contained all the solar payload instruments together with the fine-pointing Sun-sensor system. Below the instrument module was the Multimission Modular Spacecraft (MMS) containing the systems for attitude control, power, communication, and data handling. Between the instrument module and the MMS was the transition adaptor, supporting two fixed solar paddles that supplied between 1500 and 3000 W of power.

   Following an attitude control system failure in November 1980, the spacecraft was put in standby mode. A repair mission on STS-41-C in April 1984, during which Shuttle astronauts rendezvoused with SMM, was successful in replacing both the spacecraft Attitude Control System and the coronagraph's Main Electronics Box.  SMM collected data until November 24, 1989, and re-entered on December 2, 1989.

A 4-image time sequence taken by SMM on April 14, 1980 shows the outer and inner loops of a coronal mass ejection as it expands outward over the north pole of the Sun. Credit: NASA

Astronaut George Nelson attempts to capture the Solar Maximum Mission satellite during STS-41-C. Credit: NASA

See also: Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)

© 2026, Andrew Mirecki


14 February 1989


Delta II maiden launch on February 14, 1989. Credit: U.S. Air Force

On February 14, 1989, a Delta II launch vehicle made its maiden flight, with a Delta 6925 boosting the first GPS Block II satellite (USA-35) from Launch Complex 17A (SLC-17A) at Cape Canaveral. 

   The rocket was created in the late 1980s by McDonnell Douglas to fulfill the Air Force's need for a launch vehicle to carry the Global Positioning System's first generation of operational satellites into space. Over 29 years, the Delta II rocket was launched 155 times (153 times successful), with 100 consecutive successful missions, for the U.S. Air Force, National Reconnaissance Office, NASA and commercial customers. Delta II launched more than 230 satellites and was used to deploy the Global Positioning System, explore the solar system, and serve the medium-class commercial space launch market. The rocket flew in many configurations depending on individual payload needs. Delta II vehicles included the Delta 6000, and the two later Delta 7000 variants. Delta II flew its final mission on September 15, 2018.

References:

© 2026, Andrew Mirecki


14 February 1990


The view of Earth known as the Pale Blue Dot, taken by the Voyager 1 Narrow-Angle Camera at 4:48 GMT on Feb. 14, 1990. Planet Earth is visible as a bright speck within the sunbeam just right of center and appears softly blue. This is a new version of the original Voyager photo, published in 2020: Pale Blue Dot Revisited, obtained using modern image processing techniques. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

On February 14, 1990, the cameras of Voyager 1 spacecraft pointed back toward the Sun and took a series of pictures of the Sun and the planets, making the first ever "portrait" of our solar system as seen from the outside. The view of Earth known as Pale Blue Dot is a color composite created by combining images taken using green, blue and violet spectral filters by the Voyager 1 Narrow-Angle Camera, from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers (40,5 au) and 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane.  The color-filter images used were mapped to red, green and blue, respectively. They were taken at 4:48 UTC on Feb. 14, 1990, just 34 minutes before Voyager 1 powered off its cameras forever.

   Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. The spacecraft also captured views of Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Mercury and Mars were lost in the Sun's glare.

This solar system “family portrait” is the final series of 60 images captured by NASA's Voyager 1, before it powered off its cameras forever, sailing on a course out of the solar system toward interstellar space. The mosaic shows six of our solar system's planets. The wide-angle image of the sun was taken with the camera's darkest filter (a methane absorption band) and the shortest possible exposure (5 thousandths of a second) to avoid saturating the camera's vidicon tube with scattered sunlight. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

   The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan’s book, “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space,” in which he wrote:

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

The original version of the 'Pale Blue Dot' image published in 1990. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech


© 2026, Andrew Mirecki


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