A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) to begin the NROL-77 mission on behalf of the National Reconnaissance Office on Dec. 9, 2025. Image: Michael Cain / Spaceflight Now
Update Dec. 9, 2:44 p.m. EST (1944 UTC): SpaceX landed its booster at the landing zone.
The image shows a good example of the phenomenon called airglow.
The Soyuz MS-27/73S spacecraft carrying NASA’s Jonny Kim and two Russian cosmonauts undocked from the International Space Station Monday evening as the two spacecraft were sailing 262 miles above eastern Mongolica. Image: NASA
A NASA astronaut and two cosmonaut crewmates strapped into their Soyuz ferry ship Monday evening, undocked from the International Space Station and plunged to an on-target landing on the frigid steppe of Kazakhstan early Tuesday to wrap up an eight-month mission.
In other words, the matter traveled at 20% the speed of light.
(This is Part 2 of a series on primordial black holes. Check out Part 1 here!)
Aetherflux has focused its efforts on space-based solar power, with the goal of "building an American power grid in space."
Engineers can be split into two camps - those who just release whatever they’re building and try to fix whatever might be wrong with it as they get feedback on it, and those who test their product in every possible way before releasing it to the public. Luckily, NASA engineers are in the latter camp - it wouldn’t look great if all of the probes we send throughout the solar system failed because of something we could have easily tested for here at home. However, finding analogues for the places we want to send those probes remains a challenge for some NASA projects, so they make due with the best Earth has to offer. For Mars, that means testing technology in the desert’s rolling sand dune and rocky outcrops, and this year several different NASA technologies were tested in deserts throughout the country, as reported in a press release from the agency.
Video: 00:42:04
Watch the replay of the media briefing held ahead of the 14th operational launch of the Galileo programme. The briefing covers the mission details for the launch of two Galileo satellites, which are set to lift off on 17 December aboard Ariane 6 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.
SpaceX will launch a secret payload for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office today (Dec. 9), and you can watch the action live.
Leading X-ray space telescopes XMM-Newton and XRISM have spotted an extraordinary blast from a supermassive black hole. In a matter of hours, the gravitational monster whipped up powerful winds, flinging material out into space at eye-watering speeds of 60 000 km per second.
NASA astronaut Jonny Kim and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky landed on Russia's Soyuz MS-27 on Dec. 9, 2025, after 245 days on the International Space Station.
White dwarfs are called stellar remnants because they're what's left of main sequence stars after they've shed most of their mass and ceased fusion. But despite being mere remnants for whom fusion is only a distant memory, they can still be the locations of enormously powerful thermonuclear explosions called novae.
By its very nature, spaceflight is very challenging and very wasteful. As Tsiolkovsky's famous Rocket Equation establishes, propellant accounts for the majority of a rocket's mass, which is burned off during launch. The process also introduces large amounts of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, water vapor, and black carbon, as well as ozone-depleting chemicals, into the upper atmosphere. On top of that, the disposal process for satellites once they are no longer operational (deorbiting and burning up in the atmosphere) is also wasteful, with no materials retrieved or reused.
Check out the first findings from the Subaru Telescope.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 29 Starlink satellites lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. It was the record 32nd flight of the Falcon's first stage.
New simulations suggest TRAPPIST-1e's possible methane atmosphere may be a false signal from its star, raising fresh questions about the planet’s habitability.
It’s December and that means one of the best celestial events will grace the skies. The Geminid meteor shower should peak between Saturday night and Sunday morning, December 13–14.
Intermediate mass black holes (IMBH), if they exist, have between about 100 and 1000 solar masses, placing them in between stellar black holes and supermassive black holes. But while there's plenty of evidence for both stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes, the evidence for IMBHs isn't as convincing. There are many candidates, but there's no wide agreement on any of them. Yet our theories of black holes show there should be something in between stellar black holes and supermassive black holes, and IMBHs could be the missing link.
Ahead of Terminator 2D: NO FATE, we're going back in time to find some Terminator games that don't suck. Don't worry, we'll be back!
"It’s kind of a jigsaw puzzle where all the different pieces are moving."
The center of the Milky Way is an extreme environment dominated by the supermassive black hole (SMBH) Sagittarius A star (Sgr A-star). Sgr A-star has about 4 million solar masses, and its powerful gravity and radiation defines the region. Its gravity accelerates the orbits of stars and gas clouds in its vicinity. Radiation from the SMBH's accretion processes, from the stellar winds coming from colliding stars, from abundant supernovae explosions, and from superheated gas falling toward the black hole, saturates the region.
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