Top 10 space stories of 2024

This past year brought much of the world together through events both anticipated and unexpected. April’s highly awaited total solar eclipse delighted millions with the sight of a lifetime — though dodging clouds got a bit stressful for some. Less than a month later, the Sun unleashed a massive storm that lit the skies with dazzling aurorae above locales that rarely see such sights.

Also close to home, scientists found the source of the Moon’s thin atmosphere, NASA looked for commercial partners to save its Mars sample-return mission, and astronauts testing Boeing’s Starliner became long-term residents of the International Space Station when the craft’s thrusters failed to behave as planned. Farther afield, new images of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole hinted it might possess a hidden jet, astronomers discovered the heaviest galactic stellar-mass black hole, and researchers ramped up the search for atmospheric features that might signal life on extrasolar planets.

All the while, the James Webb Space Telescope made brand-new discoveries and added to old ones, continuing to prove that even as one cosmic question is answered, many more are left in its wake.

10. Exoplanet atmospheres come into focus

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is one of the most powerful tools we have in the search for habitable planets with warm, temperate atmospheres. But finding those worlds was never going to be easy.

Perhaps no single exoplanet has been more discussed and debated over the past year than K2-18 b, a planet in the habitable zone of a red dwarf 124 light-years away. At roughly 8.6 times Earth’s mass and 2.6 times its girth, scientists aren’t sure whether it is a rocky super-super-Earth or a miniature version of hydrogen-rich gas giants like Neptune.

In 2023, researchers using JWST reported that K2-18 b’s atmosphere contained carbon dioxide and methane. One interpretation of this data is that the planet has a hydrogen-rich atmosphere but a rocky surface covered with a global water ocean.

Even more tantalizing, the team reported a possible indication of dimethyl sulfide (DMS), a compound that on Earth is produced only by life — mainly phytoplankton. But the signal on K2-18 b was very tentative, the team noted; even if confirmed, it could be another chemical mimicking the spectral signature of DMS.

On May 2, 2024, a team led by researchers from the University of California, Riverside, reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that the putative DMS signal was much more likely to be caused by methane. They also concluded that distinguishing DMS from methane at that particular wavelength is probably beyond JWST’s capabilities. However, they found it is still possible that very high levels of DMS could be identified in the mid-infrared; JWST results from K2-18 b at those wavelengths are pending.Days later, another JWST study was published in Nature, reporting for the first time strong signs of an atmosphere around an exoplanet that is definitely rocky. However, that planet, 55 Canrcri e, is hardly habitable. Orbiting its host star at only 1.5 percent the distance of Earth from the Sun, its dayside temperatures likely reach 4,400 degrees Fahrenheit (2,400 degrees Celsius).

Still, the presence of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide at 55 Cancri e — and the absence of hydrogen and helium — came as a welcome find: They indicate that what JWST found is not the planet’s first atmosphere, but a secondary atmosphere. This means that even if a planet loses its first atmosphere, it can grow another — replenished by volcanic activity and sustained even in the face of its star’s radiation. That’s good news for anyone hoping that life is common in the galaxy.

9. Gaia discovers an ancient, heavy black hole

Since 2013, the Gaia satellite has been mapping stars throughout our Milky Way. Along the way, its data have facilitated numerous discoveries. Among them is Gaia BH3, the heaviest-known stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy to date.

Stellar-mass black holes are left when a massive star ends its life as a supernova. They range from a few to 100 times the mass of our Sun. Since Cygnus X-1’s discovery as the first stellar-mass black hole, it had also reigned supreme as the Milky Way’s heaviest, at 21 solar masses.
Now it’s been outdone by a dark, dormant black hole nearly four times closer to Earth.

Gaia BH3 is in a binary system with a star 1,926 light-years away. Astronomers spotted it in preliminary Gaia data meant to be released in 2026 — but the find was so exciting they couldn’t wait, publishing it May 27 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Gaia BH3 is not pulling in matter and doesn’t have a bright accretion disk to give it away. Instead, the motion of the visible star revealed an invisible companion weighing 33 solar masses. Nothing so massive could also be dark — except a black hole.

“It’s the first time a black hole of this size has ever been observed, with the exception of those detected in distant galaxies by the LIGO-Virgo gravitational observatories,” said study lead author and Gaia collaboration member Pasquale Panuzzo of CNRS, Observatoire de Paris, France, in a press release. “This is the kind of discovery you make once in your research life.”

In addition to breaking the weight record, Gaia BH3 is also shedding light on how such massive black holes form. Aging stars blow away much of their mass through winds, leaving less material to create a heavy black hole. But stars born earlier in the cosmos’ history were more massive and may have had weaker winds, thus leaving behind more massive black holes.

Backing up that story is its companion: an old, metal-poor star, meaning it has few elements heavier than hydrogen or helium. Stars are essentially metal manufacturers. Each generation of stars enriches the cosmos, so that younger generations contain more metals at their birth. Metal-poor stars are therefore from earlier in cosmic time. And based on its motion, the pair likely once belonged to a globular cluster that has long since been cannibalized by the Milky Way.

All this points to Gaia BH3 as a relic from the cosmos’ ancient past, hiding in plain sight. Furthermore, “this discovery should be also seen as a preliminary teaser for the content of Gaia DR4,” the paper concludes, “which will undoubtedly reveal other binary systems hosting a [black hole].”

8. NASA rethinks Mars Sample Return

The car-sized Perseverance rover has spent four years on Mars wheeling across the ancient lakebed of Jezero Crater, drilling and caching rock samples so that, for the first time ever, martian rock samples can be returned to Earth for close-up study. The samples were meant to be retrieved by a set of joint NASA-European Space Agency (ESA) missions over the next decade. But plans for the samples’ journey home are now crumbling in the face of budget struggles.

The mission, called Mars Sample Return (MSR), originally called for NASA to send a lander with an ESA-built rover to fetch the samples. The lander’s ascent stage, called the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), would loft the precious cargo to martian orbit to be captured by a European orbiter, launched separately, that would whisk them back to Earth in 2031.

The complexity of this scheme had already prompted multiple rethinks. In March 2022, NASA officials said they planned to launch the MAV and the ESA fetch rover on separate spacecraft to reduce risk, with return scheduled for 2033. Then, four months later, NASA and ESA said the fetch rover would be scrapped entirely. Instead, in 2030, Perseverance — which will then be going on a decade old — would deliver its own samples to the retrieval lander. As a backup, the lander would also bring two helicopter drones that could nab the samples and fly them to the MAV.

At the same time, MSR’s funding was drying up. In Congress, budget negotiations left NASA with a 2 percent budget cut in 2024. MSR was hardest hit. On Feb. 6, 2024, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which has designed, built, and operated all of NASA’s Mars rovers, laid off 530 staff — around 8 percent of its workforce.

On April 15, NASA announced the entire MSR mission was on hold and needed an overhaul. Under the existing plans, the agency estimated, the samples would not arrive on Earth until 2040, and it would cost up to $11 billion. Effectively, NASA was admitting it was out of money, out of time, and out of ideas.

To get the rocks back more cheaply and quickly, in June, NASA commissioned studies from seven firms — including Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, and Blue Origin — with various concepts and ideas for revising the mission architecture. NASA also indicated it is willing to consider proposals that would return as few as 10 samples, down from the 30 originally hoped for. The studies were due back to NASA in October.

In the meantime, China has announced plans to launch its own Mars sample-return mission, Tianwen-3, as early as 2028. Time will tell who can actually pull off the multi-planet effort.

7. Meteorites create the Moon’s atmosphere

Earth’s moon is a lightweight. While it looms large in our skies, its gravity is not strong enough to hold onto a bulky atmosphere. But it does retain a thin blanket of atoms, called an exosphere.

Planetary scientists know this exosphere is generated through space weathering, as interactions between the Moon’s surface and incoming meteorites and solar radiation generate atoms to replenish it. Without this, the exosphere would dissipate as its atoms drifted out to space. But exactly which process — or combination of them — are most important remained unknown, until researchers at MIT and the University of Chicago used soil collected by Apollo astronauts to determine last year that meteorites are the main culprit. Their work was published Aug. 2 in Science Advances.

From 10 samples, they isolated two elements — potassium and rubidium — to measure the isotopes of each in the soil. Isotopes of a given element contain the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons in the nucleus; isotopes with more neutrons are heavier. The soil preferentially contained heavier isotopes, as expected. When meteorites or radiation slam into the lunar surface, it vaporizes bits of soil. Lighter isotopes should float up to create the exosphere, while heavier isotopes fall back to the ground, but different space weathering processes leave different amounts of heavy isotopes. Comparing the ratio of isotopes of potassium and rubidium in the soil held the key to how they were released.

“The reason why we look at the ratio instead of just one isotopic system is because it can help remove many complexities and isolate the effects of certain processes. Both rubidium and potassium are moderately volatile elements with similar geochemical behaviors, meaning they tend to respond similarly to many processes, like melting and vaporization. When we look at their isotopic ratio, we’re essentially filtering out the common effects of these processes that would affect both elements similarly,” says study lead author Nicole Nie of MIT. Comparing the elements means “we’re not trying to disentangle multiple effects on a single isotopic system. Instead, we can simplify the interpretation and get clearer insights into … space weathering processes,” she says.

The ratios show that impact vaporization is creating the majority — some 70 percent — of the atoms in the Moon’s atmosphere, while solar wind reactions are responsible for the other 30 percent.

The result “is crucial for gaining insights into the space weathering processes that have shaped the lunar surface,” Nie says. “It enhances our understanding of planetary evolution. … These interactions are not unique to the Moon; they occur on other airless bodies like Mercury, asteroids, and moons of planets, so insights from the lunar exosphere can be applied to understanding surface processes across the solar system.”

6. Sgr A* may have a jet

It has been nearly three years since the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) revealed its image of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A), the Milky Way’s 4-million-solar-mass supermassive black hole. But one picture is never enough. Last year, the EHT team released an image of Sgr A in polarized light, alongside two papers published March 27 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Polarization refers to the orientation of the electromagnetic waves that make up light. When light is polarized, its waves oscillate together in a preferred direction. Within a black hole’s accretion disk of swirling, superheated plasma, magnetic field lines can align the moving particles such that they emit polarized light, essentially stamping their emission with an afterimage of the embedded magnetic field. So, examining polarization reveals a picture of the magnetic field around the black hole.

In polarized light, Sgr A* appears remarkably similar to the other black hole imaged this way: M87* in the elliptical galaxy M87. This is despite the fact that Sgr A* is roughly a thousand times less massive — and a thousand times smaller, with the plasma around it moving much quicker — than M87, hinting that strong, ordered magnetic fields might be more ubiquitous around supermassive black holes than previously thought. It also hints at something else that might be more widespread than astronomers thought: jets. Many of the most massive black holes, including M87, launch far-reaching jets from their accretion disks, powered by magnetic fields. So, if Sgr A*’s magnetic field is so similar to that of more massive black holes, could it host a jet like they do as well?

No jet has ever been seen blasting from our black hole, but the search is on. And the polarized light image is still a powerful tool, as small tweaks to model inputs can create big changes in the polarization produced, allowing researchers to better understand the conditions around our supermassive black hole.

5. Eclipse ecstasy

After years of anticipation and hype, the total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024, made good on its promises, giving tens of millions of viewers a chance to revel in the majesty of the Sun’s corona.

The eclipse was almost certainly the most-viewed in the history of the U.S. Seven years prior, the Great American Eclipse of 2017 had cut across the nation from coast to coast, with 12 million people living in the path of totality. In 2024, that number was 31 million in the U.S., as the path blanketed major metro areas from Texas to the eastern seaboard. In fact, half the entire U.S. population lived within 250 miles of totality.

Not only that, in 2024 Mexico and Canada joined the party. Making landfall in Mazatlán, the shadow of the Moon swept through Durango and the Chihuahuan Desert and on into Texas and the U.S. Midwest before straddling the U.S.-Canadian border and departing the continent via Newfoundland.

In the days leading up to the eclipse, forecasts of widespread clouds threatened to dampen the excitement. At one point, forecast models predicted that most of the U.S. would be clouded out. But come eclipse day, the bulk of the cloud cover failed to materialize, and most along the path enjoyed clear skies — or high, thin cloud layers that didn’t interfere with the Sun’s visual appearance.

Researchers took advantage of the eclipse, too. NASA awarded funding to five science projects, including chasing the eclipse with high-altitude research jets, radio-telescope observations of sunspot regions, and radar studies of the effects of the Sun’s shadow on Earth’s ionosphere. It turns out there is still plenty of opportunity to discover something new under the Sun and the Moon.

4. Starliner test flight strands astronauts

At 10:52 a.m. EDT on June 5, 2024, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the Boeing CST-100 Starliner capsule’s long-awaited first crewed test flight.

During its journey to the International Space Station (ISS), however, Starliner’s propulsion system developed two helium leaks (in addition to one noted prior to launch), as well as issues with five of its 28 thrusters. Nonetheless, it successfully docked with the ISS and Wilmore and Williams prepared to spend about a week in space before piloting the craft back to Earth.

Instead, the empty Starliner touched down at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Sept. 7, while Wilmore and Williams remained in orbit for a total of eight months, to return aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule in February 2025.

At first, NASA simply delayed the astronauts’ return, as the space agency and Boeing worked to determine what had caused Starliner’s thrusters — vital to both maneuver in space and to set the craft on a trajectory home — to malfunction. But on Aug. 24, NASA announced it would bring Starliner back uncrewed, instead adjusting the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, which launched Sept. 28, to leave two empty seats in its Crew Dragon capsule for Wilmore and Williams to return home at that mission’s end.

“When we looked at the data and looked at the potential for thruster failures [during undocking and deorbit] with a crew on board … it was just too much risk with the crew, and so we decided to pursue the uncrewed test flight,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, during a press conference to announce the decision.

Wilmore and Williams, both veteran ISS occupants, took the extra time in space in stride. “That’s how things go in this business,” Williams said in September from the station, emphasizing the uncertain nature of test flights. “This is my happy place. I love being up here in space,” she added.

On Sept. 6, Starliner left the ISS and completed all maneuvers via automation and without issue, parachuting to a landing in the New Mexico desert just after midnight local time. Its return flight data went into the hands of engineers for meticulous evaluation to determine whether changes to the thrusters might be necessary before it can be certified for crewed missions.

“We knew going in this was going to be a test mission,” said NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Space Operations Joel Mantalbano, following Starliner’s return. “We learned a lot. … To me, [this was] a success. Clearly we [have] some work to do.”

3. Sun’s wrath thrills solar storm chasers

For lovers of solar observing, 2024 was a year of spoils. In addition to April’s total eclipse, the Sun reached the peak of its 11-year cycle of activity.

Because the Sun’s gas rotates faster at its equator than at the poles, our star slowly winds itself up, its magnetic field lines twisting up like rubber bands. Every 11 years, they begin to snap, releasing explosive bursts of energy.

In 2024, sungazers were treated to dazzling displays of sunspots, prominences, and flares. These were often accompanied by coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — storms of plasma that speed through the solar system. When a CME slams into Earth’s magnetic field, it can produce geomagnetic storms and strong displays of aurorae. And when the Sun spits out several in succession, they can merge and strike with combined strength.

In early May, a gargantuan sunspot group, AR3664, unleashed half a dozen CMEs within a few days, generating a perfect storm that raced toward Earth at up to 3 million mph (4.8 million km/h). In response, the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a severe geomagnetic storm watch, warning power companies to protect their grids and GPS users to prepare for potential disruptions. It was the first G4-level watch — the second highest level, behind G5 — in nearly 20 years.

As night fell across Europe on May 10, it quickly became clear that the storm was exceeding expectations. Social media was flooded with pictures of skies ablaze with brilliant greens and magentas over European cities and the snow-covered Alps.

At 6:54 p.m. EDT, SWPC reported the storm had hit G5 conditions. In North America, aurorae were spotted in Cuba and Mexico. Globally, cameras captured aurorae as far south as the Hanle Dark Sky Reserve in India, and as far north (in the Southern Hemisphere) as Namibia.

The last geomagnetic storm of comparable magnitude was in 2003. But in terms of the human experience, there was no precedent. In 2003, the iPhone, Facebook, and YouTube didn’t exist. With the advancement of sensor technology, most people on the planet carry a camera in their pocket capable of capturing aurorae and sharing it instantly. In the 7 million or so years since primates have been walking upright across our planet and gazing up at glowing curtains of light in the night sky, the May 2024 auroral storm was a first.

This thrills scientists, who now have a veritable treasure trove of citizen-science data to study. But it also made for an extraordinary communal skywatching event, like a great comet or total eclipse, that will be remembered for decades to come.

2. Back to the Moon

Never mind the humans. In 2024, a flotilla of robotic explorers trekking to the Moon ushered in a new golden age of lunar exploration.
The first robotic lunar landers, from the U.S. and former USSR, touched down in 1966. Forty-seven years passed before China became the third nation to achieve a soft lunar landing, with 2013’s Chang’e 3. But a dizzying 10 months across 2023 and 2024 saw two new nations join that exclusive club, as well as the first soft lunar landing from a private company, and also the first rocks returned from the Moon’s farside.

On Aug. 23, 2023, India made its first lunar landing with the Chandrayaan-3 mission, depositing the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover just 390 miles (630 kilometers) from the Moon’s south pole. The craft and their suite of scientific instruments operated for 12 Earth days, until the fall of lunar night, meeting their design lifespan.

Then 2024 kicked off with Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission, dubbed the “Moon Sniper” for its main goal: making a precision landing within 330 feet (100 meters) of its planned target. The craft hit that mark on Jan. 19, although it tipped over on landing, depriving its solar panels of power. But 10 days later, as the Sun shifted in the Moon’s airless sky, it was able to recharge and awaken, sending back data and images. Though not designed to survive the lunar night — which lasts 14 Earth days — the craft unexpectedly survived three of them, making its last contact in April.

Another major milestone arrived Feb. 14, when the Houston-based company Intuitive Machines became the first company to make a soft lunar landing with its Odysseus lander. It achieved this despite a wiring error that disabled its laser rangefinders. Odysseus skidded hard on landing, breaking a leg and coming to rest at a tilt. Still, like SLIM, it was a historic milestone, even if the orientation of the craft limited operations for some of the six scientific experiments that it carried for NASA. (The mission was funded by NASA as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.)

Then, on June 1, China scored its latest achievement — collecting the first-ever samples from the Moon’s farside, with its Chang’e 6 mission. The mission was based on the Chang’e 5 architecture, but China’s delivery of a Moon-orbiting relay satellite allowed it to communicate as it landed on the farside in the South Pole-Aitken impact basin, collected samples, and flew them back to a waiting orbiter and return craft. Researchers hope the samples will shed light on why the rugged farside is so different from the lava-plain-covered nearside.

This new wave of lunar missions is already yielding scientific results. Initial analysis of Pragyan data published in Nature Aug. 21, 2024, revealed that the composition of rocks at its landing site is very similar to samples returned from the Apollo 16 and Luna 20 sites, over 1,000 miles (1,600 km) north. This strengthens the case that these rocks were once part of a global ocean of magma that coated the Moon’s surface soon after its formation.

And scientists are still gleaning information from the samples returned by the 2020 Chang’e 5 mission. A study published Sept. 6 in Science from a Chinese team found glass beads that suggest the Moon was volcanically active just 125 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed Earth, contrary to the conventional wisdom that its volcanoes have been silent for a billion years.

1. JWST makes more discoveries — and offers some answers

Unsurprisingly, the james webb space telescope (Jwst) makes our list yet again. Although it made too many discoveries to mention them all, we’re highlighting a few 2024 finds across a wide range of fields, from planets and stars to some of the biggest questions about the cosmos’ early history.

In a Feb. 22 Science paper, JWST provided the best evidence yet for the neutron star astronomers believe was left behind by the supernova SN 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The infrared scope spotted the glow of ionized gas whose atoms — called ions — have had several electrons knocked off by high-energy photons. “To create these ions that we observed in the ejecta, it was clear that there had to be a source of high-energy radiation in the center of the SN 1987A remnant,” said lead author Claes Fransson of Stockholm University in a press release. “Only a few scenarios are likely, and all of these involve a newly born neutron star.”

In April, JWST showed off its exoplanet science chops after observing starlight filtering through the atmosphere of the gas giant WASP-43 b. By combining information about the molecules the telescope saw with 3D climate models, researchers were able to map the planet’s weather from 280 light-years away: a cloudy nightside, a clear dayside, and winds at the equator reaching some 5,000 mph (8,050 km/h).

A June release highlighted another JWST first: The discovery of aligned jets from a group of forming stars. Astronomers had long suspected that stars born from the same molecular cloud should rotate in the same direction, imparted by the cloud’s motion. But they had never observed such alignment until JWST’s sharp eye caught some 20 protostars in the Serpens Nebula, with jets all aligned within 24° of the axis of the filament that had formed them.

And if you recall last year’s list, you might remember the potentially “universe-breaking” galaxies JWST turned up less than a billion years after the Big Bang: six galaxies shining so brightly that astronomers suspected they contained up to 100 billion solar masses’ worth of stars each. Galaxies so massive should not form so quickly, prompting concerns about our understanding of how early matter assembled.

Since then, researchers have been working to explain the finding. In an August paper published in The Astronomical Journal, a team using data from JWST’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science survey showed that the galaxies have normal masses and are instead getting a brightness boost from the accretion disks around their central supermassive black holes. New JWST observations showed the signature of hot, fast-moving gas in these galaxies — a hallmark of the accretion disk around a black hole.

“The bottom line is there is no crisis in terms of the standard model of cosmology,” said study co-author Steven Finkelstein, a professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin.

Although the galaxies did not grow faster than expected, “we are still seeing more galaxies than predicted” at this early time by roughly a factor of two, said lead author Katherine Chworowsky, also of UT Austin. Astronomers wonder if this strange result might be because early stars still formed relatively quickly, more easily assembling into galaxies.

So, while one mystery is solved, another has popped up. Stay tuned — perhaps next year JWST will shed even more light on this new cosmic conundrum.

Budget shortfalls threaten NASA’s future

Cost-cutting took a toll on other NASA missions in 2024.

On July 17, NASA stunned the scientific community by cancelling the mission of a $450 million Moon rover that had already been built. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) was meant to search for water ice near the lunar south pole in preparation for future Artemis crews that might take up residence in the vicinity. It only needed to pass environmental testing and be loaded onto its rocket for a 2025 launch. Looking to cut costs, NASA offered to give the rover away, free of charge, to any company or organization that was willing to bear the cost of flying it to the Moon and carrying out its original mission.

Meanwhile, the Chandra X-ray telescope spent 2024 celebrating 25 wildly productive years of observations while simultaneously being led to the guillotine. While still fully functional as the highest-resolution X-ray telescope in the sky, in March, NASA said it would lay off most of its staff later in the year. NASA also indicated in its 2025 budget request that it planned to draw the mission down to “minimal operations” — a prelude to shuttering the scope for good. Scientists responded with an extraordinary outcry and several members of Congress joined them, leading NASA to announce Oct. 23 that it would stay the observatory’s execution until Congress appropriates funds for 2025.

These issues are symptoms of a broader malaise at NASA, which was laid bare in a comprehensive report titled NASA at a Crossroads released Sept. 11 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). The body is also responsible for the influential astronomy and planetary science decadal reviews, which guide Congress, NASA, and other funding agencies in deciding which projects to prioritize.

The crux of NASA’s issues is that the agency’s purchasing power has remained essentially flat over the past two decades, yet it is directed to take on more projects than ever. This push for more missions comes at the expense of maintaining NASA’s existing resources and infrastructure. The NASEM report stated that “during its inspection tours, the committee saw some of the worst facilities many of its members have ever seen.” The report singled out the Deep Space Network — NASA’s global network of radio dishes responsible for communicating with everything from JWST to the Voyager probes — as particularly stretched and in dire need of upgrades.

The report also criticized NASA’s own lack of long-term strategic planning, particularly in the Artemis program. And the committee warned that relying on the commercial sector to develop and carry out its missions risked NASA morphing into a mere contract monitor and losing its workforce to more inspiring organizations and companies.

Stories to watch for in 2025

• NASA’s Lucy mission to explore Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids will fly by the carbonaceous main-belt world 52246 Donaldjohanson on April 20, while on its way to the gas giant.
• The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is scheduled to see first light May 16, 2025. The observatory will then undergo a review for operations readiness
  in mid-August.
• NASA’s ambitious Artemis II mission, which will send four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the Moon, is targeting a launch no earlier than September 2025.
• NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative has three launches planned for 2025. Griffin Mission 1 will test Astrobotic’s lander (sans the canceled VIPER rover); Lunar Pathfinder will place an orbiter around the Moon; and Intuitive Machines 3 will transport several payloads, including a data-relay satellite and a rover.