LightShip offers a carrier for the MARCONI system in order to serve the infrastructure role desired by both NASA and ESA https://aviatorindiaapp.com/ while also enabling lower cost passenger spacecraft and hosted science instruments, and SpotLight will also serve as an additional low-orbit relay while MARCONI and any NASA relays are deployed. One of the most important spacecraft in the fleet is Mars Odyssey, launched in 2001, which has fewer than 3 kg of fuel remaining and regardless of funding will likely be decommissioned within the next fiscal year. The intent of LightShip is to enable low-cost Mars science missions while building up infrastructure in parallel.
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- We’ve said it a few times even in this conversation, that question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe and the origins of life is such a profound question.
- Advanced Space worked with the ESCAPADE mission team since its very beginning, engaging with UC Berkeley and NASA by iterating many versions of the mission depending on launch vehicle decisions, liftoff target dates, designing spacecraft orbits, and the “get out of town” interplanetary cruise phase of the dual probes to Mars.
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You ask someone like, “Hey, when do you want to meet up?” They’re like, “I don’t know, maybe by second moon.” Because you’re going to see that thing several times in a day. It’s making me think too, that someday if people are ever living on Mars, someday, maybe fingers crossed. If you’re at the right times of the Martian year, if you’re in the equatorial or near equatorial regions, you can get multiple eclipses in one day. Phobos rises in the west if you’re on Mars and passes overhead three times a day because it has a roughly eight-hour period, Mars with a 24-hour and 40-minute or so period. It’s weird for people who aren’t familiar with its orbit compared to our Earth experience with our one moon. I’m looking forward to them and hopefully just a more chill year for space policy and funding.
Dec. 7, 1972: Apollo 17 launches
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It was a year of launches and landings and breakthroughs and losses, some surprises that we didn’t see coming and some hard lessons about how space exploration actually works. So I always encourage people to share space imagery with their family and friends to see if you might spark a little passion in somebody new. I always say that images are the low hanging fruit of space science. If you go to planetary.org and then navigate to The Planetary Report, you’ll see that. In a moment, we’re going to hear from some of our coworkers about everything that happened in space exploration this year, but I think it’s always the images that really connect with the public.
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For small missions with tight budgets, aligning technical readiness with celestial mechanics is as strategic as the science itself. ESCAPADE applies that proven strategy to Mars for the first time, promising breakthroughs in comparing planetary magnetospheres and improving habitability models for rocky worlds. Earth missions like Cluster II, THEMIS, Van Allen Probes, and MMS revolutionized magnetospheric physics by collecting simultaneous, multi‑point data—revealing dynamics impossible to decode from single‑craft time series. Once science ops begin, one orbiter may sample upstream/solar wind‑connected regions while the other dips closer to atmospheric interaction zones; swapping roles over campaigns will build a 3‑D, time‑varying picture of plasma circulation and escape channels.
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At the end of each year, The Planetary Society invites people all around the world to vote on the best images, missions, discoveries, and accomplishments that defined this recent orbit around the Sun. As 2025 comes to a close, we’re taking a moment to look back at a year that tested space exploration and the people who make it possible, while still delivering some truly breathtaking achievements. They discuss the images, missions, and accomplishments voted on by the global space community, and how space imagery continues to inspire curiosity, connection, and hope. If NG‑2 flies successfully and the twin orbiters deliver multi‑point plasma data, we’ll gain new insight into Mars’ climate history, sharpen models for exoplanet habitability, and validate a lower‑cost blueprint for doing deep‑space science in partnership with an expanding commercial launch market.
Artemis II Flight Crew, Teams Conduct Demonstration Ahead of Launch
That time is absolutely crucial, especially for a civilization like ours that’s absolutely addicted to our technology. And also the fact that it’s going to give us like a 30-minute warning on major space weather events for Earth. And the way that it does it with the energetic neutral atoms, I’m not even going to get into it because we’re going to talk more about it in a few weeks, but it’s just a really clever mission concept. It’s really going to enhance forecasting of that solar wind because we are in …
The first of hopefully many flights in the LightShip initiative will carry the SpotLight mission as its passenger. A significant contributor to the size, mass, and power requirements of current Mars orbiters is the size of the communications hardware and solar arrays required to transmit large quantities of data back to Earth. The infrastructure side of the LightShip initiative focuses on communications and navigation at Mars, calling back to the significance of the historical Lightships as it attempts to create the first permanent dedicated infrastructure system at another planet. NASA explores the unknown in air and space, innovates for the benefit of humanity, and inspires the world through discovery. Mars is the only planet we know of inhabited entirely by robots. Last summer NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover investigated its “most puzzling, complex, and potentially important rock yet,” according to one mission scientist.
Consequently, the mission design is almost entirely focused on achieving the first objective of looking for life. The second option, known as Synergy of Mars Science Measurements (30-Cargo-300), uses the same three-day mission structure but is designed to capture scientific measurements that could be recorded at a variety of landing sites, making it less site-specific. This comprehensive approach is the only campaign designed to fully address all eleven science objectives. It begins with a short 30-sol (one sol is one martian day, roughly 40 minutes longer than an Earth day) human mission to scout and set up infrastructure, followed by a massive uncrewed cargo delivery, and culminates in a 300-sol stay for the crew. The top-ranked option, called Mars Science Across an Expanded Exploration Zone (30-Cargo-300), concentrates its effort within a single exploration zone approximately 62 miles (100 kilometers) in radius. Notably the report focuses on what science each campaign would tackle and not necessarily how the science would be achieved.
Supernova Remnant Video From NASA’s Chandra Is Decades in Making
The Sun’s activity will be at its peak in 2024, providing a rare opportunity to study how solar storms and… Get the latest details, direct from mission team members. This mesmerizing view of the Martian atmosphere and Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system, were featured in a recent “Celebrity Jeopardy” question.
ESCAPADE Mars mission: NASA, UC Berkeley, Rocket Lab & Blue Origin
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He’s not a space science expert, but that was definitely a promising thing to hear. It’s so cool that we’re able to do this science because rightfully so, people look at an object like 3I/ATLAS and they think aliens. All of these different multiple spacecrafts that used their special powers to figure out different pieces of the puzzle of this interstellar object. And that was something that was super cool that happened with 3I/ATALAS is we had Hubble, we had JWST, we had multiple spacecraft from Mars, Maven, MRO, Perseverance, Psyche, Lucy. One of my favorite things in the industry that happens at all is when our spacecraft and our telescopes do an Avenger assemble moment.
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There’s so much going on in the background with things that we’re learning about cosmology from some of these missions, this whole debate over the Hubble tension, it’s not stuff that we talk about very often on Planetary Radio. SPHEREx is going to be a really cool cosmology mission that is going to lend a lot of information to Hubble and JWST, and that’s going to obviously overflow into other missions as well. The SPHEREx mission, it does have some connection to planet forming discs and things like that, but it is primarily more about cosmology.
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“We have now checked and commissioned both redundant sides of both spacecraft and found all systems healthy,” he said. “The extra 12 months in space does add some additional wear-and-tear to the spacecraft,” said Rob Lillis, principal investigator of the ESCAPADE mission at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory in California. These bonuses often match your first deposit or include free credits for testing the gameplay.
That’s one of my greatest fears about this upcoming timeline. Please bring us those samples back, even if it’s not on the timeline we initially thought of. We’ve said it a few times even in this conversation, that question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe and the origins of life is such a profound question. It is alien to us because it came from a different solar system. They’re literally objects that come to us from another solar system and they drift through our neighborhood and we have an opportunity to look at them. So 3I/ATLAS is something that has really sparked people’s curiosity about what’s out there.
New Glenn ultimately debuted on January 15, 2025, lofting the Blue Ring Pathfinder tech payload to orbit; the booster landing attempt fell short, but reaching orbit validated the vehicle’s core performance and set the stage for future missions, including a renewed shot for ESCAPADE. ESCAPADE was originally slated to fly on New Glenn’s inaugural launch in October 2024, but NASA removed the payload in September when it became clear the rocket might not be ready in time—delays that could have driven up mission costs if the probes waited idly. It’s a key to sending goods and eventually humans to the Red planet anytime, countering possible logjams due to uncompromising launch windows for direct inject Mars opportunities. “The notion of building up a colony on Mars means you are going to have to send lots of spacecraft,” said Parker. “Just like in any electronic device, chips degrade, sensors drift, radios get noisy. On top of that, cosmic rays and the Sun’s own eruptions can upset electronics. And all parts of the spacecraft are sensitive to high and low temperatures,” the Rocket Lab statement adds.
By mapping its eleven priorities to NASA’s established objectives, the committee ensures that the science done on Mars builds logically on the systems tested during the Artemis missions. This architecture is built around ten core objective areas, including lunar/planetary science, human and biological science, and lunar/martian infrastructure. The comprehensive strategy identifies the highest priority science objectives for crewed missions and proposes four distinct campaigns to achieve them. The Pasadena laboratory develops and operates missions across the fields of Astrophysics, Earth science, Planetary science, and conducts a great deal of technology development.
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- They discuss the images, missions, and accomplishments voted on by the global space community, and how space imagery continues to inspire curiosity, connection, and hope.
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- So I always encourage people to share space imagery with their family and friends to see if you might spark a little passion in somebody new.
The committee clarified that this list does not strictly align with the specific mission requirements produced by each panel. “Our report puts science at the center of what will be a remarkable achievement, and outlines the incredible knowledge we’ll have the opportunity to glean about our place in the universe.” Commissioned by NASA, the 240-page report was released by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on Dec. 9, 2025. But with NASA planning a human mission as early as the 2030s, that will soon change. Since Viking 1 landed in 1976, humans have studied Mars from afar, relying on rovers and orbiters to analyze the planet. They produced the most detailed ever map of the cosmic microwave background with the Planck mission and significantly contributed to the James Webb Space Telescope.
Asa Stahl, our science editor, and Ambre Trujillo, our digital community manager. I’m Sarah Al-Ahmed of The Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. That’s a win for Mars researchers, mission planners, and anyone rooting for more frequent, affordable trips beyond Earth orbit. Understanding space‑weather‑driven radiation and plasma conditions at Mars isn’t just academic; it informs shielding, comms reliability, and surface operations for future astronauts and robotic assets.
Because launch windows to Mars open only every ~26 months, schedule slips are expensive; missing a window can force redesigns, storage costs, or even mission cancellation. Mars doesn’t have a global dipole magnetic field like Earth; instead, it hosts a patchwork of localized crustal magnetic anomalies embedded in an atmosphere that directly interacts with the solar wind, producing a hybrid magnetosphere with traits of both intrinsic and induced systems. Blue Origin had publicly eyed a late‑spring 2025 timeframe for its NG‑2 flight, but that schedule slipped; the company now targets NET August 15, 2025, aligning the launch with a viable Mars transfer opportunity while incorporating corrective actions following the NG‑1 booster landing issue.
Free Floating Exoplanet Detected: First Confirmed Rogue Planet Mass Measurement
Your source for everything on or about the Red Planet, continuing NASA’s six decades of unparalleled exploration and discoveries. By testing new oxygen-generation technologies, Nasa is ensuring the Red Planet is no longer a death trap but a workspace. This means that when humans eventually set foot on the Red Planet, the world will watch in real-time, making a world 140 million miles away feel like it is just across the street. For the first time, we are seeing ultra-high-definition video from the Martian vicinity sent back in minutes.