Hello 2025! What’s up for the New Year?

Amid grand fireworks displays around the globe, as the world ushers in yet another round trip around the Sun, many landmark milestones and exciting events are lined up in astronomy and space exploration in 2025. We again have a year of new missions, follow-up observations, flybys, and interesting phenomena in the night sky. Here’s a list of a few I found to be interesting. There are articles linked at the end of the bite that have similar lists and cover more astronomy and space exploration events to look out for.

SPHEREx

NASA is preparing to launch a near-infrared space telescope to perform the first all-sky spectral survey. Called the “Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) mission,” it will collect spectral data in optical and infrared (wavelength range of 0.75 to 5 microns) on more than 450 million galaxies along with more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way that will help to probe the origins of the universe. It is slated to launch from the Vandenburg Space Force base in April 2025.  It is touted to provide data to make the “most colourful cosmic map ever” from its observations of the sky in 102 wavelengths. This colorful sky map is pivotal to three scientific investigations: 

1. Cosmic Origins: studying the physics of inflation based on the current distribution of galaxies 
2. Galactic Origins: tracing the evolution of the collective glow of the galaxies over time and how expansion has “stretched” this light over time and across wavelengths
3. Water Origins:  mapping the distribution of frozen water, carbon dioxide, and other life-essential molecules across the Milky Way. By studying icy dust grains in star-forming clouds, scientists aim to understand how these molecules contribute to planet formation and the potential for creating oceans similar to Earth’s.

M2/Resilience

Building upon the success of the Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon mission, Japan has expanded its efforts to contribute to larger global efforts to study the Moon. This has resulted in the M2/Resilience mission, the second mission of the Hakuto-R commercial lunar lander developed by private Japanese company ispace. It is set to be launched on Jan 31, 2025, and will travel aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. The lander will transport a micro-rover named Tenacious. Tenacious will collect some lunar regolith, which will be transferred to NASA as per the terms in an earlier contract. The mission’s key goals are centered around understanding the composition and properties of the lunar soil. A water-splitting test is to be conducted to produce oxygen and hydrogen using the stream from heating the water extracted from the lunar surface. The generated water, oxygen, and hydrogen can be used for enabling long-term lunar exploration. The rover is intended as a technological demonstration of advanced navigation systems and precision control to automate the rover’s movement–tech that will be useful for future planetary missions.

Tianwen-2

Tianwen-2, the sequel to the Chinese National Space Administration’s Tianwen-1 Mars lander and rover mission from 2020, will be headed in a different direction this time: to an asteroid and then to an active asteroid (an asteroid that shows comet-like activity). In the mission’s first phase, Tianwen-2 will visit the near-Earth asteroid 469219 Kamoʻoalewa. After remote sensing and other close-up analyses to understand the terrain and scout potential landing sites for the future, it will acquire some of the asteroid’s material via two techniques — touch-and-go and anchor-and-attach– and then return to Earth to deliver the samples for analysis. While anchor-and-attach is a novel technique, touch-and-go has been previously demonstrated by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx and JAXA’s Hayabusa2. After completing this objective, which will take around 2.5 years, it will head to the main belt active asteroid 311P/Pan-STARRS. After arriving there seven years later (estimated to be a decade from now), it will orbit the comet and perform some remote sensing. Tianwen 2 is scheduled to launch in May 2025 and is seen to expand our current understanding of the formation and evolution of the solar system. This is the second of the four Tianwen interplanetary mission series, with the third one planned to be a return to Mars and the fourth one to include both a Jupiter orbiter and a Uranus flyby spacecraft.

Saturn’s “disappearing ring” trick

That may sound surprising, right? Well, the rings will not physically disappear for another few hundred million years; they are merely not going to be visible for some time. Saturn’s inclination, or axial tilt, toward Earth, causes the rings to be seen edge-on approximately every 13 to 15 years when the Earth passes through Saturn’s ring plane. Given how thin these rings are (about a kilometer thick), they will briefly disappear from our view. This is due to happen sometime in March 2025. This event is called the ring plane crossing and is seen as an opportune time to look for undiscovered satellites or other small objects near Saturn, which the rings would otherwise occlude.

Goodbye, Juno?

Juno left Earth in August 2011 for Jupiter and started working around the planet in 2016. Now, in its extended mission, Juno continues its investigation of the solar system’s largest planet as  NASA’s most distant planetary orbiter. Juno’s extension was motivated by the goal of exploring the entire Jovian family – Jupiter and its rings and moons – along with multiple visits to Ganymede, Europa, and Io. In its extended mission, Juno provided further information on several aspects of the Jovian system, like an in-depth view of Jupiter’s atmosphere and how the volcanoes on Io came to be. But this extended mission is also nearing the end of its time. JPL mentioned that the extension lasts through September 2025 or until the spacecraft’s end of life. While the initial plan was to deorbit Juno and let it crash into Jupiter (like the end of Cassini), it is now planned to allow Juno to continue orbiting until all contact is lost with the spacecraft.

End of Gaia Science Observations

Unfortunately, everyone’s favorite astrometric space observatory, Gaia, is getting too weak to continue its science observations. It has already withstood damages due to the micrometeoroid striking the protective cover and a CCD failure likely due to the solar storm that manifested as aurorae on Earth. The spacecraft requires a cold gas micropropulsion system for precision pointing, allowing it to continue spinning and scanning the sky.  This propellant decreases by about a dozen grams per day and is reaching its end in early 2025. Hence, the ESA has announced that Gaia’s science observations will end on 15 January 2025. 

More Information

Some notable mentions that are not covered here. Besides this bite, there are other articles from science communication portals you may want to bookmark to remind yourself of what’s up (literally!) in 2025:

• Space and Astronomy highlights of 2025
• 2025 Set to Be an Exciting Year For Space Exploration. Here’s What to Expect
• Top Astronomy Events for 2025

Edited by: Will Golay