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By European Space Agency
Video: 01:08:00 Watch the replay of our Hera mission Mars flyby event. On 12 March 2025, ESA’s Hera mission came to within 5000 km of the surface of the red planet and 300 km of Mars’s more distant and enigmatic moon Deimos. During this flyby, Hera performed observations of both Mars and the city-sized Deimos. Hera then needed to swing its High Gain Antenna back to Earth to transmit its data home. On Thursday, 13 March, these images were premiered by Hera’s science team from ESA’s ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, explaining what they reveal, during our public webcast starting at 11:50 CET. The team was joined by ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst and renowned science fiction writer Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary, as well as a surprise special guest!
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By NASA
SpaceX A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the company’s Dragon spacecraft on top is seen during sunrise on the launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday, March 11, 2025, ahead of the agency’s SpaceX Crew-10 launch.
NASA astronauts Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov will lift off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA Kennedy. Once aboard the International Space Station, the Crew-10 members will conduct new scientific research to prepare for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit and benefit humanity on Earth. The crew is scheduled to conduct material flammability tests for future spacecraft designs, engage with students via ham radio and use its existing hardware to test a backup lunar navigation solution, and participate in an integrated study to better understand physiological and psychological changes to the human body to provide valuable insights for future deep space missions.
Watch the launch live on NASA+. Coverage begins at 3:45 p.m. EDT on March 12, 2025, with launch scheduled for 7:48 p.m. EDT.
Image credit: SpaceX
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By NASA
NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) observatory and PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) satellites lift off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on March 11, 2025.Credit: SpaceX NASA’s newest astrophysics observatory, SPHEREx, is on its way to study the origins of our universe and the history of galaxies, and to search for the ingredients of life in our galaxy. Short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, SPHEREx lifted off at 8:10 p.m. PDT on March 11 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Riding with SPHEREx aboard the Falcon 9 were four small satellites that make up the agency’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, which will study how the Sun’s outer atmosphere becomes the solar wind.
“Everything in NASA science is interconnected, and sending both SPHEREx and PUNCH up on a single rocket doubles the opportunities to do incredible science in space,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Congratulations to both mission teams as they explore the cosmos from far-out galaxies to our neighborhood star. I am excited to see the data returned in the years to come.”
Ground controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages SPHEREx, established communications with the space observatory at 9:31 p.m. PDT. The observatory will begin its two-year prime mission after a roughly one-month checkout period, during which engineers and scientists will make sure the spacecraft is working properly.
“The fact our amazing SPHEREx team kept this mission on track even as the Southern California wildfires swept through our community is a testament to their remarkable commitment to deepening humanity’s understanding of our universe,” said Laurie Leshin, director, NASA JPL. “We now eagerly await the scientific breakthroughs from SPHEREx’s all-sky survey — including insights into how the universe began and where the ingredients of life reside.”
The PUNCH satellites successfully separated about 53 minutes after launch, and ground controllers have established communication with all four PUNCH spacecraft. Now, PUNCH begins a 90-day commissioning period where the four satellites will enter the correct orbital formation, and the instruments will be calibrated as a single “virtual instrument” before the scientists start to analyze images of the solar wind.
The two missions are designed to operate in a low Earth, Sun-synchronous orbit over the day-night line (also known as the terminator) so the Sun always remains in the same position relative to the spacecraft. This is essential for SPHEREx to keep its telescope shielded from the Sun’s light and heat (both would inhibit its observations) and for PUNCH to have a clear view in all directions around the Sun.
To achieve its wide-ranging science goals, SPHEREx will create a 3D map of the entire celestial sky every six months, providing a wide perspective to complement the work of space telescopes that observe smaller sections of the sky in more detail, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope.
The mission will use a technique called spectroscopy to measure the distance to 450 million galaxies in the nearby universe. Their large-scale distribution was subtly influenced by an event that took place almost 14 billion years ago known as inflation, which caused the universe to expand in size a trillion-trillionfold in a fraction of a second after the big bang. The mission also will measure the total collective glow of all the galaxies in the universe, providing new insights about how galaxies have formed and evolved over cosmic time.
Spectroscopy also can reveal the composition of cosmic objects, and SPHEREx will survey our home galaxy for hidden reservoirs of frozen water ice and other molecules, like carbon dioxide, that are essential to life as we know it.
“Questions like ‘How did we get here?’ and ‘Are we alone?’ have been asked by humans for all of history,” said James Fanson, SPHEREx project manager at JPL. “I think it’s incredible that we are alive at a time when we have the scientific tools to actually start to answer them.”
NASA’s PUNCH will make global, 3D observations of the inner solar system and the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, to learn how its mass and energy become the solar wind, a stream of charged particles blowing outward from the Sun in all directions. The mission will explore the formation and evolution of space weather events such as coronal mass ejections, which can create storms of energetic particle radiation that can endanger spacecraft and astronauts.
“The space between planets is not an empty void. It’s full of turbulent solar wind that washes over Earth,” said Craig DeForest, the mission’s principal investigator, at the Southwest Research Institute. “The PUNCH mission is designed to answer basic questions about how stars like our Sun produce stellar winds, and how they give rise to dangerous space weather events right here on Earth.”
More About SPHEREx, PUNCH
The SPHEREx mission is managed by NASA JPL for the agency’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace) built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions in the U.S., two in South Korea, and one in Taiwan. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. The mission’s principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available at the NASA-IPAC Infrared Science Archive.
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) leads the PUNCH mission and built the four spacecraft and Wide Field Imager instruments at its headquarters in San Antonio, Texas. The Narrow Field Imager instrument was built by the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. The mission is operated from SwRI’s offices in Boulder, Colorado, and is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
NASA’s Launch Services Program, based out of the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, provided the launch service for SPHEREx and PUNCH.
For more about NASA’s science missions, visit:
http://science.nasa.gov
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Alise Fisher
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-2546
alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov
Calla Cofield – SPHEREx
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
Sarah Frazier – PUNCH
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
202-853-7191
sarah.frazier@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Mar 12, 2025 EditorJessica TaveauLocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe and Ices Explorer) Astrophysics Heliophysics Launch Services Program Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) Science Mission Directorate View the full article
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By NASA
Official portrait of NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, who will serve as a flight engineer during Expedition 73. Credit: NASA NASA will provide interview opportunities with astronaut Jonny Kim beginning at 9 a.m. EDT, Tuesday, March 18, to highlight his upcoming mission to the International Space Station in April.
The virtual interviews from Star City, Russia, will stream live on NASA+. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media.
Media interested in participating must contact the newsroom at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston no later than 5 p.m., Monday, March 17, at 281-483-5111 or jsccommu@mail.nasa.gov. A copy of NASA’s media accreditation policy is online.
Kim will launch on Tuesday, April 8, aboard the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky. The trio will spend approximately eight months aboard the orbital laboratory before returning to Earth in the fall 2025. During his time in orbit, Kim will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to help prepare the crew for future space missions and provide benefits to people on Earth.
Kim is making his first spaceflight after selection as part of the 2017 NASA astronaut class. A native of Los Angeles, he is a U.S. Navy lieutenant commander and dual designated naval aviator and flight surgeon. Kim also served as an enlisted Navy SEAL. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of San Diego and a medical degree from Harvard Medical School in Boston. He completed his internship with the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. After completing initial astronaut candidate training, Kim supported mission and crew operations in various roles, including the Expedition 65 lead operations officer, T-38 operations liaison, and space station capcom chief engineer. Follow @jonnykimusa on X and @jonnykimusa on Instagram.
For more than two decades, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge, and making research breakthroughs that are not possible on Earth. The station is a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight and to expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit. As commercial companies focus on providing human space transportation services and destinations as part of a robust low Earth orbit economy, NASA is able to focus more of its resources on deep space missions to the Moon and Mars.
Learn more about International Space Station research and operations at:
https://www.nasa.gov/station
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Joshua Finch / Claire O’Shea
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / claire.a.o’shea@nasa.gov
Raegan Scharfetter
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-910-4989
raegan.r.scharfetter@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Mar 11, 2025 EditorJessica TaveauLocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
Humans in Space Astronauts Expedition 73 International Space Station (ISS) ISS Research Jonny Kim View the full article
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