Space

As 3I/ATLAS sweeps past Mars toward Jupiter, space agencies are syncing Mars orbiters, ESA’s JUICE, and NASA’s Europa Clipper to watch its coma and tails in real time. The goal is a reusable playbook for the next interstellar visitor.

Launched in March 2025, NASA’s SPHEREx has taken first-light images and begun a two-year, 102-color all-sky infrared survey. Over the next year it will map water and organics, sharpen inflation-era cosmology, and supercharge rapid follow-ups with JWST, Euclid, and Rubin.

China’s Tianwen-2 launched on May 29, 2025 toward Kamoʻoalewa, an Earth quasi-moon. If it returns about 100 grams by late 2027, the sample could test the lunar-fragment idea and reshape plans for chemistry, defense, and exploration.

After reaching orbit on January 16, 2025, Blue Origin’s New Glenn is racing toward a second act: sending NASA’s twin ESCAPADE probes on a fast, lower-cost ride to Mars in an early November window. Here’s how a commercial heavy lifter, smallcraft design, and transfer vehicles are compressing deep-space timelines.

A summer of interagency laser links turned a decade of demos into day one of operations. DSOC on Psyche and Europe's first cross-support show optical can deliver 10-100x more science by 2030.

A rare, day-scale gamma-ray burst detected by Einstein Probe and Fermi kept flashing for 24 hours. New analysis suggests a shredded white dwarf and a jet from an intermediate-mass black hole, hinting at a new class of cosmic transients.

Two private landings, the first cellular network on the Moon, and a working lunar satnav demo turned 2025 into a year of operations, not experiments. See how CLPS changed pace and what to watch through 2027.

Astronomers just turned a single JWST eclipse into a full latitude–longitude–altitude map of WASP-18b, exposing a searing hotspot, a cooler ring at the edges, and water chemistry that changes with height. Here is how 3D eclipse mapping works and why it rewires our biosignature playbook.

Congress preserved a critical funding lane for NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX, keeping the Bennu-proven spacecraft on course to watch Apophis skim past Earth on April 13, 2029. Here is what the mission will do, why it matters for planetary defense, and how a possible European partner could amplify the science.

A power shortfall in BepiColombo’s transfer module forced ESA and JAXA to rewrite the cruise. Anchored to the January 8, 2025 flyby, here is how they preserved a late 2026 capture and which science turns on first.

In June 2025 the Vera C. Rubin Observatory moved from stunning test images to the brink of a live, minute‑scale alert stream. Here is what the next 12 months will look like and how to get ready to turn alerts into discoveries.

Two ESA satellites flew 150 meters apart to block the Sun and reveal the corona for hours, proving precision formation flying that points to starshades, modular observatories, and sharper space‑weather forecasts.

A December 27, 2024 firestorm on Io outshone every volcanic hotspot ever seen, and the timing across multiple vents points to a connected magma network beneath the surface. Here is what Juno found, what Earth-based observatories can still confirm, and why it changes how we search for volcanic exoworlds.

After a quiet late-May launch, Tianwen-2 is on track to rendezvous with Kamoʻoalewa in mid-2026 and attempt a sample return by late-2027. If successful, it could confirm a lunar origin for our quasi-moon and sharpen the playbooks for small-body operations and planetary defense.

Launched on an H3 rocket in October 2025, JAXA’s HTV-X1 reached the International Space Station with power, cooling, and hosting chops that turn a cargo run into months of lab time. Here is why that shift matters and how to use it.

On March 12, 2025, ESA's Hera skimmed past Mars to line up a late 2026 rendezvous with Dimorphos, the asteroid nudged by DART. Here is how Hera will turn a cinematic hit into a calibrated planetary defense playbook.

First Chang'e-6 results date the South Pole–Aitken basin to about 4.25 billion years and reveal an exceptionally dry farside mantle. That combination resets lunar timelines and reshapes where, and how, we hunt for polar water.

From October 30 to November 6, 2025, Europa Clipper may cross the ion tail of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. With small, low-risk tweaks to pointing and data cadence, NASA and ESA could capture the first in-situ signatures from an interstellar tail.