The year 2025 has begun and with it, humanity will venture into a wide and exciting range of space missions.
The year is filled with a series of moon landing attempts in January and February, the death of Juno spinning toward Jupiter, SpaceX’s Starship megarocket, near-Earth asteroid sampling, and much more.
Below are some of the most exciting and cool space missions coming in 2025:
Two moon landing attempts
Texas-based Firefly Aerospace will launch “Ghost Riders in the Sky” in mid-January, which hopes to carry a lunar lander with 10 NASA payloads.
The mission will head to Mons Latreille, a volcanic formation that formed from volcanic eruptions on the natural satellite more than 3 billion years ago, according to Living science.
Blue Ghost 1 is expected to operate during the daylight hours of one lunar day, which is approximately equivalent to 14 Earth days.
It will embark on a journey that will collect data about the moon’s regolith, or rocky surface, and how that rock interacts with the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field. Toward the end of the mission, it will also take images of the moon’s sunset and collect data on changes to the lunar surface after dark.
As for Texas-based Intuitive Machine, they hope to land their IM-2 spacecraft south of the moon in February. The mission aims to measure the volatile or delicate chemical compounds of the natural satellite using a drill and a mass spectrometer.
The spacecraft will also carry Lunar Trailblazer, a small satellite designed to map water reservoirs on the Moon to help NASA select and identify its future landing sites for its Artemis missions.
Juno will spin until it dies on Jupiter
NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been diligently studying Jupiter and its moons since 2016. The mission had previously been extended, but it will finally breathe its last in September 2025, when the spacecraft is ready to turn toward the gas giant.
It can only live if it survives Jupiter’s intense radiation.
According to the mission plan, Juno’s orbit will gradually shrink and be pulled by Jupiter’s gravity and its dense clouds.
The final launch will last about 5.5 days and will ensure that the spacecraft and any Earth bacteria that may have traveled with it do not accidentally contaminate Europa, Jupiter’s ice-covered moon, considered one of the best places in our solar system to find extraterrestrial life by our scientists.
Sampling of a near-Earth asteroid
China is preparing for a mission to collect pieces of a near-Earth asteroid, return the samples to Earth, and then explore a comet deep in space.
The Tianwen-2 spacecraft, scheduled to launch in May 2025, will encounter 469219 Kamo’oalewa.
The spacecraft will conduct remote sensing observations to evaluate potential landing sites before attempting to collect rock samples. The samples will then be transferred to Earth and then use the planet’s gravity to launch on a seven-year deep space mission that will take it to the main belt comet 311P/PANSTARRS in the 2030s.
