Will 2025 be the year of Starship? | Get ready for a 'New Year Comet'! Here's what to expect | Auroras, solar eclipse, Starship: Google's Breakout Searches of 2024
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SpaceX's Starship megarocket may come into its own in 2025. The 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket system ever built, and it's designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. In 2025, SpaceX could try to launch it up to 25 times.
In the second week of 2025, we could see a new object grace the skies as comet ATLAS (C/2024) G3 gets close to the sun. In the wake of comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) in October, comet G3 is due to reach perihelion — its closest to the sun — on Jan. 13, 2025. That day, this icy visitor to the inner solar system will get to within just 8.3 million miles (13.5 million kilometers) from the sun.
This year, Google's "Breakout Searches of the Year," for 2024 were showcased in an emotional YouTube video released earlier this month. Among some of the year's highlights were some of the most epic space stories of the year.
We could be in for a New Year's aurora treat with northern lights potentially visible deep into mid-latitudes tonight and tomorrow (Dec. 30 to Dec. 31). Due to an incoming solar storm, also known as a coronal mass ejection, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Space Weather Prediction Center issued a G3 (strong) geomagnetic storm warning for Dec. 31.
Auroras are one of the most dazzling shows in the night sky, but to see them, you have to be in the right place at the right time. Our aurora forecast live blog tells you everything you need to know about upcoming geomagnetic activity and the likelihood of seeing the northern lights depending on your location. We will also keep you informed of any significant space weather events such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and coronal holes which could bring strong aurora-sparking solar winds our way.
New details about the small pieces of the moon gifted by the United States to Ireland in 1970 have now been unearthed. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the Apollo 11 lunar samples, themselves.
2024 was a big year for space science in many ways, but it may well prove to be the most important year for the universe's most troubling and mysterious "ingredient," dark energy, since its discovery almost three decades ago. This was the first year that scientists got an exciting observational hint that the force driving the accelerating expansion of the cosmos could be "growing up."
The year 2024 has been another challenging one for Earth's climate, marked by record temperatures, extreme weather events, and urgent warnings from scientists about the accelerating pace of global warming. An analysis by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the European Union agency that tracks global warming, suggests this year will be the hottest since instrument record keeping began more than a century ago — beating climate records set just last year.
SpaceX's launch of 21 new Starlink satellites from Florida marked the company's 134th Falcon flight in 2024, surpassing the company's prior year total by 38 missions. Of this year's launches, 89 were devoted to expanding the Starlink global network.
It seems fair to say that this year has arguably been a page-turner in defining and refining interest in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), a new term — rightly or wrongly — for Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), those unknown events or craft seen in our skies.
