Another year is upon us, which means another year of mission launches, spaceflight milestones and, of course, amazing things to see in the night sky.
From a visit to an asteroid and a milestone in human spaceflight to two lunar eclipses and an unusually bright Mars, here are 2025’s space missions and observing highlights.
Asteroid sampling
China’s ambitious mission will visit both an asteroid and a comet, returning samples to Earth.
China’s space agency, CNSA, will continue to progress in 2025 when it launches the follow-up to its debut Mars mission, Tianwen-1, which landed a rover on the Red Planet in 2021.
Tianwen-2, scheduled to launch on a Long March 3B rocket in May, will be completely different, visiting a near-Earth asteroid and then a comet.
Its first stop will be Kamo‘oalewa (‘oscillating celestial object’ in Hawaiian), a 40–100-metre (130–330ft) near-Earth asteroid that briefly went into orbit around Earth in 2024.
It’s the first mission to study a small asteroid, though scientists think Kamo‘oalewa may be a fragment of the Moon loosened by an asteroid striking its far side millions of years ago.
The solar-powered Tianwen-2 will spend 2.5 years making close-up studies of the asteroid and also take a sample to return to Earth in a capsule that will parachute into China.
Tianwen-2 will then travel to a comet called P/2013 P5 (PanSTARRS), reaching it in the 2030s.
A second private lunar landing
The IM-2 lander will be the latest craft to set its sights on the lunar south pole.
Private spaceflight company Intuitive Machines will make a second lunar landing attempt, in February 2025 at the earliest, with IM-2.
The primary payload is a NASA experiment package, PRIME-1, that will investigate the feasibility of using lunar resources in situ, drilling lunar soil which it will analyse for useful materials such as water.
The lander has been updated following the failure of the previous lander, IM-1, in February 2024.
A ‘space shuttle’ visits the ISS
The Dream Chaser spacecraft hopes to provide another way to access low Earth orbit.
Having welcomed its first astronauts on 2 November 2000, this year will mark 25 years of continuous habitation of the International Space Station (ISS).
However, that landmark arrives amid uncertain times for the orbiting laboratory.
It’s only funded until 2030 and Boeing’s stricken Starliner spacecraft – which in June 2024 suffered leaks and stranded two NASA astronauts on the station for several months – underlined just how much NASA and the ISS now relies on SpaceX.
That could change in 2025, when Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser Tenacity gets its chance to become NASA’s second ‘space taxi’ when it launches atop a Vulcan Centaur rocket on an uncrewed cargo delivery mission to the ISS.
The nine-metre-long (30ft) spacecraft, which looks like a mini Space Shuttle and also lands on a runway, is contracted to NASA for seven cargo delivery missions, but it can take up to seven astronauts. Its maiden voyage is pencilled in for May 2025.
SpaceX goes for a double catch
The company’s Starship has developed at incredible speed.
Spaceflight history was made in October 2024 when SpaceX launched its Starship Flight Test 5 from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas.
During the mission, the Starship spacecraft successfully entered orbit on top of a Super Heavy reusable booster rocket.
A few minutes after lift-off that booster returned to Earth to be dramatically caught by mechanical ‘chopsticks’ – nicknamed ‘Mechazilla’ – on the launch tower.
What will SpaceX do next? Details of Starship Flight Test 6, due in 2025, aren’t yet clear, but according to Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, engineers will next time try to have Mechazilla catch Starship as well as the booster.
Until now, test flights have seen Starship crash or splash down in the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX’s lightning-fast development of Starship is impressive but also critically important for NASA, because Artemis III – the agency’s upcoming crewed landing on the Moon – requires an adapted and tested version of Starship that can land on the lunar surface.
NASA shoots for the Moon (eventually)
Humans were due to return to lunar orbit, but preparations continue
When putting this list together, September 2025 was go time for NASA’s first crewed mission
to orbit the Moon in 53 years.
However, NASA has since announced that Artemis II and III will be delayed until 2026 and 2027, respectively.
A 10-day test flight, Artemis II will see one Canadian Space Agency astronaut and three NASA astronauts launch in an Orion capsule atop the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for the first time.
Two million pounds of thrust will send the astronauts into two orbits of Earth before moving into a highly elliptical orbit, where they will experience a total eclipse of the Sun before going into lunar orbit.
The mission is an essential test of hardware ahead of Artemis III, the first crewed mission to land on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, which is now planned for 2027.
Saturn loses its rings
The planet’s tilt will make them invisible from Earth for most of this year.
Saturn’s rings will disappear in 2025. The sixth planet’s rings have been closing for a few years and in March they will become invisible from Earth until November.
The phenomenon occurs because Saturn orbits the Sun every 29 Earth years and rotates on an axis tilted by 27°.
Over the course of a Saturn year, it tilts away from and toward the Sun and experiences seasons, much as Earth does.
Consequently, every 14-and-half years, Saturn’s tilt aligns the rings with the line of sight from Earth, so we temporarily see them edge-on.
Saturn will be lost in the Sun’s glare in March, so it’s not something to observe until it emerges in April and May, and then comes to its annual bright opposition on 21 September.
Long before that, on 4 January, Saturn will be occulted by a crescent Moon in the southwest after sunset for European observers; from London, the planet will disappear at 17:21 UT to re-emerge at 18:32 UT.
Just two weeks later, on 18 January, Saturn and Venus will get to within just 2° of each other above the southwest horizon in the post-sunset sky, an event visible across the world.
A special year for Mars
The Red Planet will be extra bright at opposition
Seasoned observers will have noticed that Mars has been getting noticeably brighter and redder since October, the inevitable run-up to the Mars's once-every-26-months opposition on 16 January.
The best time to observe the Red Planet since its last alignment with Earth and the Sun in December 2022, a planet’s opposition sees its entire disc lit up, but it also means it rises in the east at sunset and sets in the west at sunrise.
Be sure to observe it on 12 January when it’s nearest to Earth, when it should be at its brightest at magnitude –1.4.
The next opposition of Mars will occur in February 2027.
The brightness of Mars during 2025 also makes its conjunctions worth observing.
On 13/14 January, US astronomers will be treated to the near-full Moon occulting the planet, while UK viewers will witness a close pass on 13 January and 9 February.
On 3 May, Mars moves across the stars of the Beehive Cluster (M44) in Cancer.
Lunar highlights
The full Moon comes in for a close-up in 2025
In 2025, the Moon will get closer to Earth than at any time since February 2019, when a so-called ‘supermoon’ (technically referred to as a perigee syzygy Moon) on 5 November sees our natural satellite just 356,833km (221,726 miles) distant.
A lesser supermoon will rise on the months either side of that date, on 7 October and 4 December.
However, a 2025 highlight for astrophotographers will be the Moon repeatedly passing through the sparkling Pleiades open cluster of stars.
Sadly, none will be easy to image.
On 10 January, 12 September, 10 October and 4 December, bright near-full Moons will blast across the ’Seven Sisters’ stars, making them challenging both to see and image.
However, from the UK, early risers on 23 June may snag a view of a 7%-lit crescent Moon in the east, sitting plumb against the Pleiades.
Other lunar highlights in 2025 include two post-sunset conjunctions with Jupiter in the west on 28 May and in the east on 7 December.
Venus rises and falls
Catch Venus next to the crescent Moon.
The ‘Evening Star’, as Venus is called, will live up to its name on 16 February when it reaches its greatest brilliance after sunset at a remarkable magnitude –4.8.
Use a small telescope in the first few months of 2025 to see the phases of Venus change from being half-lit on 11 January (its dichotomy) to an increasingly slim crescent.
After that bright showing, Venus will rapidly sink into the Sun’s glare, passing between Earth and the Sun (its inferior conjunction) on 22 March.
It will emerge as a brilliant ‘Morning Star’ before sunrise during April and quickly peak in brightness on 24 April.
During its evening apparition, it will be closely passed by a crescent Moon after sunset on 3 January, 1 February and 1 March.
See the same sight before sunrise on 22 June, with Jupiter joining the fray on 21 and 22 July, and 20 August.
On 19 September, a 6%-lit crescent Moon will pass very close to Venus and Regulus.
A quartet of eclipses
Two total lunar eclipses will turn the Moon a deep red.
After two total solar eclipses in seven years, in 2017 and 2024, North Americans may have thought their celestial luck had ended. Not quite.
The coming year will see a partial solar eclipse on 29 March.
It’s mainly visible in Europe and the Arctic, but eastern Canada and the extreme northeastern US will arguably get the best views.
A big eclipsed sunrise will be observable if skies are clear from Boston (42% of the Sun’s surface covered) and eastern Maine (83%) in the US and Québec City (72%) and Newfoundland (86%) in Canada, which will be a dramatic sight.
In the UK, a small partial will be seen mid-morning, with London seeing 31%, Cardiff 35% and Edinburgh 41%. Aurora hunters in Iceland will see a 70% partial eclipse.
2025’s second partial solar eclipse, on 21 September, will be observed only from New Zealand and Antarctica.
Eclipse-wise, 2025 will be dominated by two total lunar eclipses, the first since 2022.
On 13/14 March and 7/8 September, the full Moon moves through Earth’s umbral shadow in space to create an eerie-looking, reddish lunar surface for a few hours.
Both events will be technically visible from the UK during the moonset in the early hours of 14 March and at moonrise on 7 September.
Observers in North America will get a fabulous view of the 13/14 March event in true darkness, but miss out entirely on September’s ‘blood moon’.
