12 April
From Halbeeg, the open encyclopedia · Af-Soomaali
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12 April is the twelfth day of April in the Gregorian calendar, the calendar used internationally. It is the 102nd day of the year; in leap years it is the 103rd day. After this day, 263 days remain in the year.
April has 30 days, so 12 April falls in the first half of the month. The day of the week on which 12 April falls varies from year to year, and recurs in a fixed pattern according to the 400-year cycle of the Gregorian calendar.
Landmark: space exploration
The most commemorated event on 12 April is the spaceflight of Yuri Gagarin, who on 12 April 1961 became the first human to travel to space, orbiting Earth in the Vostok 1 spacecraft of the Soviet Union. For this reason, the United Nations designated 12 April as the International Day of Human Space Flight.
On the twentieth anniversary of that flight, 12 April 1981, the United States launched the first mission of the Space Shuttle program, the STS-1 flight of the shuttle Columbia. The coincidence of these dates led to the day becoming widely commemorated in the space science community as "Yuri's Night."
Other historical events
12 April 1861 marks the beginning of the American Civil War, when Southern forces opened fire with artillery on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Also on 12 April 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States died, succeeded in the presidency by Harry S. Truman during the final months of World War II in Europe.
On how calendar days are indexed
Articles of this kind are not about a single event, but form part of a standard system for organizing information by calendar date. Wikidata (item Q25683103) assigns a unique identifier to each day, allowing events, births and deaths to be associated with that date. This enables computer systems to link a date with its corresponding events.