Centaur, the upper stage of the Vulcan Centaur, is designed for orbit. During the recent Spacepower Conference in Orlando, Florida, ULA CEO Tory Bruno said that Centaur could be upgraded to function in a defensive capacity in orbit.

If an adversary were to endanger U.S. Space Force assets, the Centaur could operate as a "space interceptor" that could act fast to provide defense. "What I've been working on is essentially a rocket that operates in space," Bruno said on Dec. 12, according to SpaceNews.

Bruno outlined a vision for space defense in a blog post on Dec. 4, where he pointed out that while the military depends on space more than ever, U.S. military assets in space are currently without defense. "To keep the peace," Bruno wrote, "we also must have a credible space defense."

In the post, Bruno discusses satellites used to damage or disrupt other spacecraft, calling them "satellite killers." However, he said, satellites only have the ability to maneuver slowly, due to small thrusters and a limited store of low energy propellant. So, current satellites may take days or weeks to reach their target.

The orbital defense Bruno proposes would move fast in space using powerful thrusters and an ample energy supply to stop a potential satellite killer within hours, before it reaches its target. "I mean a squadron of lightning fast, long range, lethal interceptors," Bruno writes. "To use a naval analogy, we need destroyers in orbit, the Greyhounds of Space."

Bruno's medium post also discusses the importance of disabling hostile satellites in a way that does not create a large debris field, as space debris stays in orbit for weeks in low orbit — or in high orbit, the debris remains for centuries.

Space debris comes with the danger of damaging everything in its path. "There are no national borders in space," Bruno writes. "It is a common environment, shared by all."

Meanwhile, the Space Force is positioning itself as a "cornerstone" of U.S. defense, and says it can face the challenges that arise when space has become more congested and contested.

"Space is no longer a sanctuary. It's a contested domain," Space Force Indo-Pacific commander Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Mastalir said at the 2024 Spacepower Conference in Orlando, Florida. "Our mission is to ensure that we can operate in that domain and continue to provide support across all areas of conflict."

After successfully completing Vulcan Centaur's second certification mission on Oct. 4, ULA is looking to launch Vulcan Centaur on its first national security mission with the Space Force, which is currently scheduled for late 2024 or early 2025.

If the Centaur upper stage can be upgraded to stay in orbit for longer periods of time to provide satellite defense for Space Force assets, ULA could have an important new capability that may lend the company a hand in the steeply competitive spaceflight industry.

Taken by the German-built High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express orbiter in June 2022, and by NASA's NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on September 2022, these images showcase what appears to be a snowy landscape in the Australe Scopuli region of Mars, near the planet's south pole.

But the "snow" seen here is quite different from what we have on Earth.

In fact, it's carbon dioxide ice, and at Mars' south pole, there's 26-foot-thick (8-meter-thick) layer of it year-round. (These image was actually taken near the summer solstice, not the winter one — it's very cold here all year long.)

So why does it look like there's just a dusting of "snow" in this images? Those darker areas are layers of dust that have fallen on top of the ice. The dust is typically found deep beneath the ice, but a seasonal process brings some of it to the surface.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter also saw winter frost lining the sides of dunes on Mars. This frost can prevent erosion, NASA writes, keeping the dust that makes up the dunes in place until the thawing season in spring.

As sunlight warms the carbon dioxide ice on Mars' south pole in the summer, the ice begins to sublimate, or turn directly from a solid into vapor. As it does so, pockets of trapped gas form within the ice.

Eventually, the pressure builds enough to create a little gas eruption, which is powerful enough to shoot the dark dust found beneath the ice into the air. As the dust falls back to the surface, the wind carries it into these swirling patterns. (Side note: a similar process creates the spider-like features found on the Martian surface.)

So what looks like a beautiful pastoral winter scene in these Mars Express images is actually a dynamic summer scene, where gas jets spew dust across the surface. Hey, at least it's still cold outside — just a casual -193°F (-125°C).

In 1976, Stephen Hawking rocked the astrophysics world with his discovery that black holes aren't entirely black. Instead, they emit tiny amounts of radiation and, given enough time, can give off so much that they disappear entirely. But this introduced a massive problem. Information flows into black holes as they consume matter, and that information can't escape. But Hawking radiation doesn't carry any information with it. So what happens to it when the black hole disappears?

This "black hole information paradox" has bedeviled researchers for decades, and they have developed numerous potential solutions. One is known as nonviolent nonlocality. In this scenario, the insides of black holes are connected to their outsides through "quantum nonlocality" — in which correlated particles share the same quantum state — an effect Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." This nonlocality is "nonviolent" because nothing energetic like an explosion or merger that is causing the ensuing gravitational waves — the ripples in space-time outside the black hole. Rather, they are being caused by the quantum connections between the inside and outside of the black hole.

If this hypothesis is true, the space-time around black holes carries tiny perturbations that aren't entirely random. Instead, the variations would be correlated with the information inside the black hole. Then, when the black hole disappeared, the information would be preserved outside it, thus resolving the paradox.

In a recent preprint paper that has not been peer-reviewed yet, researchers at Caltech investigated this intriguing hypothesis to explore how we might be able to test it.

Related: 'Impossible' black holes discovered by the James Webb telescope may finally have an explanation

The researchers found that these nonlocal quantum correlations don't just make an imprint in the space-time around a black hole; they also leave a signature in the gravitational waves released when black holes merge. These signatures exist as tiny fluctuations on top of the main gravitational wave signal, but they have a unique spectrum that clearly separates them from the usual waves.

The researchers went on to outline a program for separating out this special signal. They found that current gravitational wave detectors, like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory and the Virgo interferometer, don't have the sensitivity to comprehensively determine if nonviolent nonlocality is an accurate solution to the black hole information paradox. But next-generation instruments that are currently being designed and constructed might be able to do it.

The next step for the research is to build even more-accurate models of how nonviolent nonlocality affects the space-time around realistic black holes. This will provide a precise prediction of what the changes in the gravitational wave signals should look like — and it just might lead to a resolution of the infamous paradox.

The home to all these? Well, you can find and watch sci-fi on a series of excellent streaming hubs, including Paramount Plus, Disney, Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. These platforms are home not only to new entries in the sci-fi genre, but some are the only places to stream entire franchises with exclusive access. Fortunately, there's an abundance of streaming deals so you don't have to break the bank this holiday season.

Our list of the best sci-fi movies of 2024 is not only titles you'll find across the streaming landscape but includes something for everyone to enjoy, regardless of whether you're looking for a blockbuster or something more family-friendly.

8. "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes"

• Release date: May 10, 2024
• Cast: Owen Teague, Freya Allan, Kevin Durand, and more
• Director: Wes Ball

Almost seven years had passed when director Wes Ball picked up the reins and brought this iconic reboot of the franchise to the big screen, picking up from the events of War of the Planet of the Apes. This entry, though, jumps forward by 300 hundred years. In a change from the original characters, there's a new cast including protagonist Noa, a young hunter ape, who is brought to the fore, although storyline-wise, it still follows Caesar's legacy.

The new ape king, Proximus Caesar, may bear the name of his ancestor but preaches in favor of evil. As clans become enslaved and humans have seemingly regressed to a more primitive state, it comes down to Noa and Mae, a human woman, to determine what happens next for their civilizations. Highly praised for carving out a new era in the franchise, it does so with captivating visuals and incredibly impressive performances from its new stars.

7. "A Quiet Place: Day One"

• Release date: June 28, 2024
• Cast: Lupita Nyong'o, Joseph Quinn, Djimon Hounsou, and more
• Director: Michael Sarnoski

While John Krasinki famously directed the first two A Quiet Place films, he handed over his directorial duties to Pig's Michael Sarnoski. Although, he's still very much involved in the story as A Quiet Place: Day One is one they conceived together. As a prequel and spin-off, this entry takes the franchise in a new direction - the alien invasion's origin being witnessed in the once hustling and bustling New York City. If you know the franchise though, you'll know that these aliens prey on noise, so to survive, you need to stay completely quiet and so New York City falls eerily silent.

Sam (Lupita Nyong'o) is a terminally ill woman living in hospice care. While she's convinced to head out on a group outing to Manhattan, the alien invasion begins and all roads out of the city are cut off. With her cat, Frodo, by her side, she meets Eric (Joseph Quinn) and they navigate this new world in the hopes of surviving. A wonderful performance from the pair takes the core concept of the first two movies while remaining true to the deeper exploration into character, all while surviving the unthinkable.

6. "Alien: Romulus"

• Release date: August 16, 2024
• Cast: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Isabela Merced, and more
• Director: Fede Álvarez

Like Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the Alien franchise also returned after a seven-year hiatus with a surge of new life. This time, returning to its roots as a horrifying nightmarish sci-fi thriller smothered in jaw-clenching moments. But, it brought its own twist and turns to the established franchise this time round. It follows a group of young space colonists as they face, you guessed it, the return of the Xenomorphs.

All it took was Evil Dead's Fede Álvarez to prove the creature could still be incredibly feared, despite its first appearance happening over three decades ago. And while so much time has passed, that doesn't mean there aren't cocoons left to disturb.

Though it's the 9th entry into the franchise, we voted it the third best in our Alien movies, ranked worst to best guide. In fact, we said: "It expertly mixes things up every few minutes whilst coming up with a number of all-new sequences that are both conceptually playful and well-executed on-screen".

5. "The Wild Robot"

• Release date: September 27, 2024
• Cast: Lupita Nyong'o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, and more
• Director: Chris Sanders

Amidst a list full of returning franchises, The Wild Robot carves its own place in the sci-fi movie landscape and this animated adventure from DreamWorks is based on a novel of the same name by Peter Brown.

Returning to our list once again, Lupita Nyong'o is the voice of Roz, a service robot that finds herself stuck on a forest island with no human life, but plenty of local wildlife. Roz learns their language to try and build relationships with the animals, it's not an easy task. But, the robot does form a connection with a goose, Brightbill, who is found orphaned and alone and vows to protect it.

The mix between the robotic protagonist and their vastly different surroundings makes for an interesting watch. She's a service robot after all and wants to help, but trying to fit in in a place she doesn't belong tells a wonderfully touching story of when modern meets wild.

4. "Deadpool & Wolverine"

• Release date: July 26, 2024
• Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney, and more
• Director: Shawn Levy

As with previous Deadpool movies, the dark humor and epic fight scenes commence almost immediately in Deadpool & Wolverine. But, as the title suggests, it's not just the Merc with a Mouth leading the tale this time, as he teams up with Wolverine to make a comic book pair up so many thought would never happen.

In Deadpool & Wolverine, Deadpool finds himself in a bind. His reality is in jeopardy, as he's told as much by the Time Variance Authority, but, in true Deadpool fashion, he doesn't play by the rules. Instead, he opts to find a variant of Wolverine from the timeline to help them both save their realities.

It's a deliciously twisted entry to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially considering fans thought they'd seen the last of Wolverine in 2017's Logan. But, dreams can come true, and this superhero duo makes sure those dreams are executed with style. There are also some very fantastic cameo appearances from the Fox franchise where Deadpool moves across from that’ll make you feel a little bit warm inside.

3. "Transformers One"

• Release date: September 20, 2024
• Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, and more
• Director: Josh Cooley

As the first animated feature-length film in the entire franchise, Transformers One tried something new, and it was deeply appreciated. As a sort of prequel, it heads back to the days before Optimus Prime and Megatron were at war, telling their origin story, as well as exploring Cybertron. There's plenty of humor, stunning visual effects, and a wonderful Autobot adventure to enjoy making this one of the best sci-fi movies in 2024.

In our Transformers movies ranked, worst to best guide, Transformers One immediately shot to number two, second only to the original Transformers movie. And we placed it there because of the way this movie totally redefines the Cybertronians for a new generation (something Hasbro was incredibly keen to do), but not without honoring the lore.

But, although it had a great reception from fans, this sentiment wasn't mirrored in the way it performed at the box office. Alas, there may not be a sequel, who knows, but it's a most excellent addition to the much-loved franchise.

2. "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga"

• Release date: May 24, 2024
• Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, and more
• Director: George Miller

When director George Miller brought Mad Max: Fury Road to the world, it quickly became one of the most stunning and impressive action sci-fi titles with an impressive 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. To follow it up almost a decade later was a hefty task, but one that Miller embarked on with a prequel in mind - the tale of Furiosa, before she met Mad Max.

Young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) is taken by a biker horde, led by warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). As she's taken across the Wasteland, they come to the Citadel, run by another warlord, Immortan Joe. Here, she must fight for her survival between two warring forces. In true Mad Max fashion, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is every bit as volatile, visually captivating, and a downright glorious cinematic experience. No bother if you missed it in cinemas in 2024, TVs these days are more than capable of bringing the vibrancy to streaming platforms.

1. "Dune: Part Two"

• Release date: March 1, 2024
• Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Austin Butler, and more
• Director: Denis Villeneuve

As Frank Herbert's epic sci-fi novel was split into two, Dune: Part One acted as a movie that formed the setup for what was to come. And, Dune: Part Two let the story rise in spectacular fashion. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother (Rebecca Ferguson) found themselves deep in the deserts of Arrakis, looking to seek revenge on the people who destroyed their family as Part One ended. And this is where Part Two picks up. For this, he unites with Chani (Zendaya) and the Fremen to fight for not just their own survival, but the fate of the universe.

The star-studded cast is just one of many factors that make this sci-fi title the most impressive flick of 2024. The narrative story building is epic in proportion, the visuals are spectacularly captivating, and despite the almost three-hour runtime, you'll find yourself so intertwined in the storyline that you'll be hoping for more.

It will also provide information as to when a particular solar system planet might be passing near to another, or a bright star, as well as the constellation that each will occupy during the course of the year as well as the various circumstances such as conjunctions, oppositions, and elongations that are on this upcoming year's schedule.

Want to see the planets up close? Be sure to check out our best telescopes for viewing planets guide and our more general guides for the best binoculars and the best telescopes. If you're interested in taking your own impressive skywatching images, we have a guide on how to photograph the planets as well as recommendations for the best cameras for astrophotography and the best lenses for astrophotography.

Mercury

As an evening star, Mercury appears in the western sky setting about an hour after the sun. As a morning star, it appears in the eastern sky rising about an hour before the sun. There must be a clear, unobstructed horizon on these occasions. Mercury usually appears as a bright "star" with a yellowish or ochre hue.

Mercury will be visible in mornings from Jan. 1 to Jan. 15; evenings from March 1 to March 14; mornings from April 3 to May 16; evenings from June 12 to July 22; mornings from Aug. 12 to Aug. 28; evenings from Oct. 4 to Nov. 12; mornings from Nov. 28 to Dec. 25.

Brightest in 2025 (evening): Mercury will be brightest and easiest to spot in the evening sky between March 1 and March 14.

Brightest in 2025 (morning): Mercury will be brightest and easiest to spot in the morning sky between Nov. 28 to Dec. 25.

Venus

Always brilliant and shining with a steady, silvery light, Venus will appear in the western sky at dusk from Jan. 1 to March 15, and in the eastern sky at dawn from April 1 through Nov. 6. From mid-February through early May, it will be visible as a slender crescent in steadily held binoculars and telescopes.

Brightest in 2025 (evening): Venus will be brightest in the evening sky from Jan. 28 through Feb. 27, reaching its greatest brilliancy on Feb. 14.

Brightest in 2025 (morning): Venus will be brightest in the morning sky from April 13 through May 12, reaching its greatest brilliancy on April 27.

On the morning of Aug. 12, Venus will pass less than one degree south of Jupiter; the two planets making for a striking sight with the fainter Jupiter sitting less than a degree to the upper left of the dazzling Venus low in the east-northeast sky in the brightening dawn sky.

Venus will pass to the north of the much-fainter bluish star Regulus (in Leo, the Lion) on the morning of Sept. 19; the planet and star will appear low in the east-northeast predawn sky, separated by just over a half a degree. Adding to this display will be a lovely crescent moon just above Venus, creating a pleasing celestial tableau.

Mars

Mars shines like a star with a yellowish-orange hue, and can vary considerably in brightness. Mornings from Jan. 1 to Jan. 14; evenings from Jan. 15 to Nov. 12. Mars begins the year as a brilliant object in the dim zodiacal constellation of Cancer the Crab.

Brightest in 2025: Jan. 10 to 19. It will be closest to Earth on Jan. 12 at 8:37 a.m. Eastern Time at a distance of 59.7 million miles (96.1 million km). Since Mars can come as close as 34.6 million miles (55.7 million km) to Earth as was the case in 2003, this year is not a particularly close encounter.

Three days later, Mars arrives at opposition to the sun: rising at sunset, peaking high in the south at midnight and setting at sunup. It will also be shining at its brightest for 2025 at magnitude -1.4; just a trifle dimmer than Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. On January 13, an occultation/eclipse of Mars by the full moon will be visible across North America.

Other close encounters with the moon occur on Feb. 9 and June 30. In the weeks and months that follow, Mars will become a fixture in the evening sky, but will recede from the Earth and consequently will get progressively fainter. When it finally fades into the evening twilight glow of early November, it will be 225 million miles (362 million km) from Earth and just 1/13 as bright as it was in mid-January.

On June 17, Mars passes only 0.75-degree north of the bluish star Regulus, brightest star of the zodiacal constellation of Leo the Lion. The planet and star will be at almost equal brightness and their color contrast will be striking.

Jupiter

Jupiter will be quite brilliant with a silver-white luster during evenings from Jan. 1 to June 3 and mornings from July 16 to Dec. 31. Jupiter will not come to opposition during 2025; opposition in 2026 will be on Jan. 10.

Brightest in 2025 from Dec. 26 to 31. During this interval, Jupiter will shine like a dazzling silvery "star" of magnitude -2.7 located in the zodiacal constellation of Gemini the Twins. On the morning of Aug. 12, Jupiter will be situated less than one degree north of Venus.

Saturn

Saturn shines like a yellowish-white "star" of moderate brightness. The planet's famous rings are only visible in a telescope, and they will turn edge-on towards our perspective from Earth on March 23. For several weeks they will be all but impossible to see even in the biggest of telescopes.

Saturn starts 2025 within the boundaries of Aquarius, the Water Carrier, where it will remain for the rest of the year. Evenings from Jan. 1 to Feb. 23; Mornings from March 30 to Sept. 20; evenings again from Sept. 21 to Dec. 31.

Brightest in 2025: Sept. 14 to 25. Saturn is at opposition to the sun on Sept. 21.

Uranus

Uranus can be glimpsed as a naked-eye object by people who are blessed with good eyesight and a clear, dark sky, as well as a forehand knowledge of exactly where to look for it. At its brightest it shines at magnitude +5.6 and can be readily identified with good binoculars.

A small telescope may reveal its tiny, greenish disk. Uranus begins 2025 in the constellation of Aries the Ram and remains there until March 4 when it moves into Taurus the Bull where it will remain for the balance of the year. Evenings from Jan. 1 to May 2; mornings from June 5 to Nov. 20; evenings again from Nov. 21 to Dec. 31.

Brightest in 2025: Oct. 20 to Dec. 26. Uranus will arrive at opposition to the sun on Nov. 21.

Neptune

Neptune spends all of 2025 in the constellation of Pisces, the Fishes. At a peak magnitude of +7.8, this bluish-hued world is only visible with good binoculars or a telescope.

Neptune will be visible evenings from Jan. 1 through March 4; mornings from April 6 through Sept. 22; evenings again from Sept. 23 to Dec. 31.

Brightest in 2025: July 26 to Nov. 22. Opposition is on Sept. 23.

Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmers' Almanac and other publications.

Starring Emily Watson (Valya Harkonnen) and Olivia Williams (Tula Harkonnen) "Dune: Prophecy" is centered 10,000 years before the birth of Paul Atreides and concerns the formation of the mystical Bene Gesserit sisterhood as told through the tragic events of two siblings from the disgraced Harkonnen royal family. Their cultish orchestrations seek to influence the course of the Imperium and its royal houses through genetic manipulation and subtle control.

News of the renewal occurred during a virtual finale press conference that Space.com attended on Dec. 19 with showrunner Alison Schapker and stars Emily Watson and Olivia Williams.

"Well, I am thrilled to be able to announce that HBO is picking us up for a season two," Schapker revealed during Thursday's press conference. "We are so thrilled and grateful for their support, for our partners at Legendary, and most of all that we get to continue working with these extraordinary people in front of the camera, behind the camera, that we get to continue telling this story that we care so deeply about, and get to continue building out our corner of the 'Dune' universe. So that is our very exciting news."

This six-episode miniseries acts as a backstory to the pair of recent "Dune" movies helmed by director Denis Villeneuve. "Prophecy" was created by Diane Ademu-John ("The Haunting of Bly Manor”) and Alison Schapker ("Fringe," "Altered Carbon"), who serves as co-showrunner alongside executive producer Jordan Goldberg. It's adapted from Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s 2012 novel, "Sisterhood of Dune."

Co-produced by Legendary Television and Warner Media, "Dune: Prophecy's" international cast also includes Mark Strong (Emperor Javicco Corrino), Travis Fimmel (Desmond Hart), Jodhi May (Empress Natalya), Sarah-Sofie Boussnina (Princess Ynez), Josh Heuston (Constantine), Mark Addy (Evgeny Harkonnen), Edward Davis (Harrow Harkonnen), Chloe Lea (Lila), Jade Anouka (Sister Theodosia), Faoileann Cunningham (Sister Jen), Aoife Hinds (Sister Emeline), Chris Mason (Keiran Atreides), Jessica Barden (Young Valya, and Emma Canning (Young Tula).

"Dune: Prophecy" airs its season finale Dec. 22 on HBO and streaming on Max.

After last week's startling reveal that Desmond Hart was Tula Harkonnen and Orry Atreides' abandoned love child — marking the genesis of the millennia-long rivalry of these two Great Houses — there's a whole lot to unpack in this extended finale titled "The High-Handed Enemy." Let's get into it!

On Wallach IX, Tula is fretting away, haunted by the ghosts of decisions past since learning that Desmond Hart is her long-abandoned son. With the help of Kazir, a former sister turned Suk School doctor, they determine that Desmond's powers come from a bio-engineered virus that feeds on fear. Someone (or something) mutated him with this virus, but if they can chemically counter its effects, they can produce a cure. In attempting to transmute the virus, Kazir has a vision of "The Monster of Arrakis" before being roasted from within and dying to Tula's horror.

We then flashback to that pivotal moment as Valya gains the support and loyalty of Tula, Francesca, and Kasha after she uses The Voice to kill her fundamentalist opposition, Sister Dorotea. During a private moment, young Tula tells her sister that she's pregnant and a plan is put in motion for the child to be protected. Eventually, she'll give him up to an itinerant worker and swap out the baby for the anonymous woman's stillborn child. Sisters Above All!

Back to the present at the royal palace, Princess Ynez is arrested by Empress Natalya for trying to free the incarcerated Keiran Atreides. Francesca takes that news to Valya, who swiftly whips up a complex plot to employ Sister Theodosia's Face Dancer skills and Francesca's resurrected romance with the Emperor to assassinate him with a poison lancet.

Down in the Sisterhood caverns after Sister Jen loosens Lila's restraints, which is a bad idea given that the tormented girl is a resurrected force to be reckoned with, especially since she's grappling with multiple personalities of deceased ancestors of the Sisterhood. The current resident is Sister Dorotea, the zealot who was murdered by Valya decades ago. Now though, she's an instrument of truth as she leads the acolytes to the mass grave where young Valya and her followers killed anyone who stood against them in the aftermath of Dorotea's self-inflicted slashing. It's a truly horrific revelation as we're privy to the pit of piled-up skeletons at the bottom of the reflecting pool.

To help restore the Order's righteous path, Lila then destroys the genetic thinking machine, Anirul, which has been Valya and Tula's AI breeding index program.

With Ynez in jail and Natalya aligned with Desmond Hart to play puppetmasters with the weakened Javicco, the final kick to the stomach for the despot arrives in the form of Francesca, who reveals Valya's murderous plan. Javicco decides he can control only one thing in his preordained life and stabs himself with his dagger right before Natalya enters. Seeing her big power trip foiled, she kills Francesca with the poisoned needle intended for the Emperor. Not a very merry moment on Salusa Secundus!

Meanwhile, Theodosia shapeshifts into a palace guard and sticks a knife into Desmond Hart, who falls but is not mortally wounded. Valya arrives and demands that Desmond reveal the vision of her "end" that he mentioned to her earlier in the season. In a trippy netherworld dream sequence, we relive the moment Valya saves Griffin from the icy water by first using The Voice.

This nightmare intensifies when Tula arrives to soothe Valya's vision as she slowly transmutes the Omnius mind virus. This leads to images of a colossal sandworm erupting from the deep desert and a horrific scene of Desmond being operated on by robotic arms, etching a thinking machine into his eyeball (yes, it's gruesome!). This comes from the same shared nightmare of the Sisterhood, replete with the terrifying black maw and blue machine lights. From an observation window above the operation room, a blurry cloaked figure watches the grim experiment on Desmond.

Sensing she must kill Desmond for all this to end, Valya is suddenly shocked when Tula uses The Voice to stop her. Tula finally explains that Desmond Hart is in fact her abandoned son. Stunned by the web of lies, Valya concedes and declares that she’ll continue to dig into the mystery of who these thinking machine monsters are and exits. Tula and Desmond embrace and share a whispered reunion, prior to Desmond ordering her to be arrested by the guards but clearly touched by the intimacy.

We end this outstanding "Dune" prequel series where it sort of all began for the dangerous Imperial soldier Desmond Hart, as Valya, Ynez, and Keiran touch down on Arrakis, with Valya boldly declaring that "The path to our enemy begins here."

What will become of Valya and Tula's fractured relationship? How will Natalya and Desmond restructure the power platform of the Imperium? What is this shadowy evil force behind it all? And are there answers waiting for Valya on Arrakis that will provide personal redemption and reestablish the Sisterhood?

Now that a second season has been ordered by HBO, these questions will all be fleshed out at some point in the near future, but we'll have to be patient for now. Until then, more fruitcake and fudge will certainly help the interminable wait.

This gift comes courtesy of a team of researchers who believe that mysterious JuMBOs (Jupiter-mass binary objects) are actually stellar cores that have been violently "unwrapped" by massive, powerful stars like kids excitedly unwrapping presents on X-mas day. This could potentially solve a mystery that arose in 2023.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) discovered 42 pairs of these free-floating planetary-mass objects in the Orion Nebula Cluster. They were confused because they weren't associated with a star and had somehow managed to stay in binary pairs. This suggested that JuMBOs didn't form like planets or stars, creating quite the conundrum.

The team that devised this idea to explain JuMBO formation, led by Richard Parker of the University of Sheffield and undergraduate student Jessica Diamond, did so by revisiting an old idea to explain this new phenomenon.

The theory revolves around "photo erosion," a process during which massive and violent stars, O-type or B-type stellar objects, blast other stars with high-energy radiation to strip away their outer layers. This idea fits because the star-forming Orion nebula is replete with hot and massive OB stars.

"We are using quite an old idea - that radiation from massive stars is so strong it erodes the gas 'core' that eventually forms a star," Parker told Space.com. "The radiation removes some of the material from the core, reducing its mass, but also compressing the remaining material so that it efficiently forms a low-mass object."

Revisiting a paper published exactly 20 years ago, the team used the fact that stars commonly form in binary systems and then applied the photo erosion framework to demonstrate that a stellar binary could be photo-eroded to form a JuMBO pairing.

"I think of JuMBOs as a cross between stars and brown dwarfs - they would have been like stars had it not been for the radiation from the more massive stars, which has sculpted them to be more like brown dwarfs," Parker continued.

That adds another celestial body to the JuMBOs mix, so before going further, let's make like the Ghost of Christmas Past in Charles Dicken's classic "The Christmas Carol" and travel back in time to 2023 when JuMBOs were first discovered to see how they defied categorization.

"Brown dwarfs, planets or stars" JuMBOs play charades with astronomers

As explained above, the big mystery about JuMBOs is they seem to defy the formation avenues that lead to both stars and planets.

JuMBOs have masses comparable to a few times that of Jupiter, so that may immediately suggest that they also form like planets from the ring of gas and dust that surrounds infant stars. However, the pairs of JuMBOs found in the Orion Nebula aren't associated with stars.

That is explainable. Planets often "go rogue" and get ejected from the planetary systems by gravitational interactions with passing "intruder stars" or even through interactions with their own planetary siblings.

The problem with this idea of explaining JuMBOs is that the energy needed to eject two planets from around their star should also cause their binary arrangement to be broken. Yet, JuMBOs still exist in binaries.

Of course, it is plausible that some freak occurrence could cause twin planets to be ejected without splitting them up. However, astronomers didn't discover one or two JuMBO pairs in Orion; they found 42 in one relatively small corner of the Milky Way! That indicates whatever is going on is no freak incident.

So, why did astronomers think that JuMBOs didn't form like stars? That was all down to their masses.

Stars are born when overdense patches in a massive cloud of gas and dust grow and collapse under their own gravity. This births a protostar that continues to gather matter from its prenatal cocoon of gas and dust. Usually, these protostars gather enough mass to generate the pressures and temperatures in the core to fuse hydrogen to helium, which is the nuclear process that defines what a main sequence star is.

As Parker pointed out, many stars are born with a binary partner from the same cloud and become binary stars. It's estimated that about half of all known stars are in such a partnership. Mystery solved, right? Wrong!

Here's the catch.

The more massive a star is, the more likely it is to be in a binary. About 75% of the most massive stars exist with a partner. That number drops to around 50% for stars with masses like the sun and continues to drop as mass reduces. That means the chance of finding a star with a planetary mass in binary should be virtually zero.

Remember, the JWST found 42 pairs of JuMBOs in one nebula alone. Again, that indicates there is something going on here that is more than a mere fluke.

JuMBOs aren't rogues at all

In Parker and Diamond's theory, JuMBOs do indeed form like stars, but they start off with enough mass to allow them to reside in binaries. It is then the violent radiation blasting out of other, more massive stars that erode this much of this mass away, thus leaving JuMBOs with planetary masses.

"This removes the need for JuMBOs to form as massive planets and somehow be ejected from their parent stars as a binary pair," Parker said. "They aren't really 'rogue.' In our idea, JuMBOs would have formed a normal and common stellar binary if it had not for the extreme radiation from nearby massive stars, of which there are several in Orion."

He added that the theory also rules out the need for JuMBOs to form as brown dwarfs with very unconventional orbital separations with binary partners that are not observed anywhere else in the cosmos.

The brown dwarfs referenced by Parker are objects that form like stars, but during that protostar phase, they fail to gather enough mass to trigger the fusion of hydrogen to helium. For this reason, brown dwarfs are often given the slightly unfair nickname "failed stars."

They have masses between around 10 and 80 times that of Jupiter, which is about 0.01 to 0.08 times the mass of the sun. As expected with these diminutive masses, brown dwarfs are rarely found in binaries.

"I think of JuMBOs as a cross between stars and brown dwarfs - they would have been like stars had it not been for the radiation from the more massive stars, which has sculpted them to be more like brown dwarfs."

Parker explained that to verify his and Diamond's idea astronomers need to scour other star-birthing regions packed with massive stars for JuMBOs. If they are correct, the stronger the radiation from these stars, the smaller the JuMBOs found in proximity to them should be!

"So in regions where there are lots of massive stars, the JuMBOs should be less massive," he continued. "Alternatively, if we found JuMBOs in regions where there was no radiation from massive stars, that would rule out our idea immediately!"

Parker thinks that astronomers may have to act fast to study these pairs of JuMBOs in Orion. But if he and Diamond are right, don't worry  —  there should be new JuMBOs popping up shortly.

"I've been working on calculating whether JuMBOs would survive for very long in a crowded environment like the Orion Nebula Cluster," he said. "It seems that lots of them are disrupted, meaning that many more than are observed would need to form to explain the observations."

If astronomers are looking to get Parker an X-mas gift for his and Diamond's theory, the University of Sheffield researcher will be fine with a surprise. That really sums up his attitude to discoveries like JuMBOs.

"My mantra is 'never expect anything and keep an open mind at all times!'" Parker concluded. "There is always going to be some aspect of physics we didn't consider or overlooked, so nothing should be surprising, but everything is fascinating, and it's our job to explain it all!"

That means he won't be expecting those socks that you are looking to re-gift!

Diamond and Parker's research was published in November in the Astrophysical Journal.

This record-breaking feat was conducted by the Parker Solar Probe, which flew to within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun, braving the blistering heat of our star's outer atmosphere, the corona.

The flyby, which should have occurred at 6:53 a.m. EST (1153 GMT), was the 22nd time Parker had made a close passage to the sun. Though the NASA craft is expected to make at least two more flybys of the sun, this is the closest it has ever and will ever come to the star. And, to be clear, we say "should have" because NASA had to lose contact with the spacecraft during this flyby; the first proof that Parker survived will arrive on Dec. 27, according to the agency.

Parker is no stranger to smashing records. On Sept. 21, 2023, Parker hit a speed of 394,736 miles per hour (635,266 kilometers per hour) to cement its record as the fastest object ever built by humanity.

During its Christmas Eve passage, scientists say the sun-touching spacecraft would have been traveling at 430,000 mph (692,000 kph), also breaking its previously set speed record. For comparison, that is around 300 times faster than the top speed of a Lockheed Martin jet fighter here on Earth.

This incredible feat of speed could be reached thanks to the aid of seven gravity "boosts" from Venus flybys, the last of which occurred in November 2024.

The Parker Solar Probe continues its true mission

But breaking records is just a byproduct of Parker's main mission: to learn more about the sun. In particular, the spacecraft needed to brave the 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius) temperatures it will experience to collect data about the solar corona.

Scientists hope this data can help solve a long-standing mystery about the sun's outer atmosphere, which has troubled them for decades. The so-called "coronal heating problem" refers to the fact that, despite being further from the sun's primary source of energy (its core), the corona is much hotter than the sun's surface, the photosphere.

Our standard model of stars suggests that the closer one gets to the stellar core, where main sequence stars like the sun perform nuclear fusion to forge hydrogen into helium and release energy, the hotter it gets.

All the layers of the sun seem to stringently obey this rule — except the corona, which can reach temperatures in excess of 2 million degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 million degrees Celsius). Around 1,000 miles closer to the source of the sun's heat, the photosphere reaches a relatively balmy 7,400 degrees Fahrenheit (4,100 degrees Celsius). That's like finding out this Christmas that your chestnuts only roast when you drive them a mile away from an open fire!

Therefore, there must be an extra mechanism heating the solar corona, and scientists are understandably eager to discover what it is.

Parker will continue its mission, making flybys of the sun on March 22, 2025, and then its final planned flyby will happen on June 19, 2025.

During both of these approaches, the spacecraft will come almost as close to the sun as it did on Christmas Eve while traveling at a similar speed.

The past year was a big one for space.

Skywatchers across the United States witnessed a total solar eclipse, SpaceX caught a giant rocket out of mid-air with a pair of chopstick arms, and telescopes on Earth and in space revealed to us images of the universe that have changed our very understanding of the cosmos.

Want to relive the epic year in space? Scroll on to see some of 2024's most memorable moments.

Starlinks flashing ISS

NASA astronaut Don Pettit shared this image in November, saying, "Starlink satellites look like a miniature version of the monolith from '2001: A Space Odyssey,' where the large flat face of the monolith points towards Earth and the solar panel protrudes outward like the fin on the back of a dimetrodon."

SpaceX has launched hundreds of its Starlink satellites over the past year, and in a post on X, Pettit describes the image's different line streaks. "Compared to the well-defined streaks from star trails, this time exposure shows wonky streaks flashing ISS. These are Starlink satellites reflecting pre-dusk or pre-dawn sunlight off their solar panels. They are only seen from 5 to 18 degrees preceding or trailing the sun. They create bright flashes, perhaps lasting for a few seconds each due to the orientation of their outward pointing solar panels."

Read more: SpaceX Starlink satellites seen as ‘wonky streaks’ by ISS astronaut (photos)

Galactic masquerade glares its eyes on Halloween

Like a mask covering two cosmic eyes staring unblinking into the abyss, these two spiral galaxies grazed one another several million years ago, and peered into our souls last Halloween.

This image's fiery glare, resembling eyes swirled in their galactic arms, is a combination of mixed-spectrum captures using the James Webb Space Telescope for mid-infrared light, and the Hubble Space Telescope for visible and ultraviolet light. On the left, IC 2163, passes just behind NGC 2207, on the right.

The ATLAS anti-tail

Earth was lucky enough to be graced with comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) in October, which was visible to millions with the naked eye.

This zoomed-in image of the comet was taken by astrophotographer Miguel Claro from the Dark Sky Alqueva reserve in Portugal on Oct. 13, 2024 when the comet was displaying an impressive level of brightness and details, as well as a cool 'anti-tail.'

Read more: Astrophotographer captures comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS growing an anti-tail (photos)

Tsuchinshan-ATLAS from our own backyard

Though it only stayed in our skies for a few weeks, Tsuchinshan-Atlas was already fading toward the end of October. This image was shot in Bloomington, Indiana at a farm called Whippoorwill Hill, where the comet emerged about a half hour after sunset, before quickly setting behind the barn pictured here.

Super Heavy tower catch

The one we all held our breaths for.

SpaceX launched its 400-foot-tall (122 meters) Starship vehicle for the fifth time ever in mid-October, sending the giant rocket aloft from its Starbase site in South Texas.

In a world's first, SpaceX's Super Heavy executed what appeared to be a bull's-eye landing, hovering near its Mechazilla launch tower as its metal "chopstick" arms grabbed it mid-air. This was one you had to see to believe.

Read more: SpaceX catches giant Starship booster with 'Chopsticks' on historic Flight 5 rocket launch and landing (video)

Northern Lights illuminate the skies over the U.S.

2024 was the year for the aurora borealis!

Swooping down to altitudes rarely visited by the northern lights, powerful eruptions of plasma from the sun throughout 2024 splashed Earth's protective magnetic field with multiple dazzling displays. We are currently experiencing a period of solar maximum, an 11-year cycle of solar activity. It's likely we may so even more of these events in 2025.

Hurricane Milton looms over the VAB

October and September were also hard months for many, as hurricanes left devastation across parts of the United States. This photo shows Hurricane Milton when the storm made its way across the state to NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC).

Though the Space Coast didn't experience as severe storm surges and wind speeds as cities like Tampa or Sarasota, KSC was on high alert, raising the base status to HURCON 1 — closing the center to all but essential personnel.

Pink Running Chicken

More astrophotography from 2024 included this amazing image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Stare deep in the rich pink textures of this gas cloud in the Running Chicken Nebula. The cloudy stellar nursery, IC2948, is only a small portion of its larger nebula, but contains countless stars in the early stages of life. This image was processed from a 1.5-billion-pixel image taken by the VLT Survey Telescope (VST).

According to ESO, the section of space in the sky only takes up about one-third the size of a full moon, while the whole Running Chicken Nebula spans about 25 full moons across.

The first commercial spacewalk

It was a historic moment. As the sun rose across the eastern portion of the United States, miles above, in orbit of the Earth, Jared Isaacman and the Polaris Dawn crew completed the first-ever commercial spacewalk.

Taking turns exiting their Crew Dragon spacecraft, Isaacman, Polaris Dawn mission commander, and Sarah Gillis, mission specialist, took turns testing the mobility and functionality of SpaceX's new extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits. Pictured here, Isaacman floats in Dragon's open hatch, grabbing the specially-designed Skywalker mobility aide, as he looks down at the Earth below.

Read more: SpaceX Polaris Dawn astronauts perform historic 1st private spacewalk in orbit (video)

A Milky Way marvel over Stonehenge

Photographer Josh Dury captured this absolutely breathtaking view of this year's Perseid meteor shower above Stonehenge, U.K.

According to Dury, the image is composed of 43 sub-images of the meteors taken over three and a half hours. "Celestial fireworks baring the connection through time. The ancient debris of Comet Swift-Tuttle; formed at the early dawn of our solar system. Observed from the ancient palace — chartering the movements of heavenly bodies. A pertinent narrative through senseless time and mystery," Dury told Space.com via email.

Read more: Rare display of northern lights and Perseid meteor shower delights skywatchers worldwide (photos, video)

Hubble sees a doomed star

This star, Eta Carinae, is expected to explode sometime soon. Maybe.

The star could also have another million years to go. But the mass of Eta Carinae means that when it finally does go boom, it will likely be a supernova event. The star, one of the most massive in the Milky Way, is also monstrous enough to leave behind a black hole when it dies.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been monitoring Eta Carinae for the last quarter of a century, waiting for it to finally undergo its death throes.

Related: Watch a 180-year-old star eruption unfold in new time-lapse movie (video)

Atlas V launches its last Space Force mission

United Launch Alliance's (ULA) venerable Atlas V rocket flew its final national security mission over the summer. The Atlas V launched from Florida's Canaveral Space Force Station July 30, on a classified mission for the U.S. Space Force called USSF-51.

It was the last national security space launch (NSSL) for a member of the Atlas rocket family, which has been flying since 1957. Now, ULA has begun to shift its national security manifest to the company's new Vulcan rocket.

Read more: Atlas V rocket launches its final national security mission for US military (video)

The Crab's claws

A new mosaic of the Crab Nebula by the mighty James Webb Space Telescope was released in June. The image traces the crab's "claws" in fresh, exquisite detail. This image revealed detailed cage-like structures in the nebula, formed by countless dust grains, seen particularly prominently as fluffy magenta material in the upper right and lower left.

Starliner seen docked at the International Space Station

The wayward tale of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft and its return to Earth without its astronaut crew has been well reported since its launch in June. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams flew aboard Starliner to the International Space Station (ISS), where the pair still remain, and will well into 2025.

But, while their spacecraft was still docked to the ISS, Maxar Technologies' WorldView-3 satellite managed to zoom way in to spot the vehicles in orbit together above Earth. In addition to the Starliner capsule, nearly all the ISS modules are clearly visible, as well as the station's new upgraded solar panels.

Touting their imaging capabilities, Maxar Technologies shared this amazing photo in a social media post June 13, saying, "this type of imagery collection, known as non-Earth imaging (NEI), is a breakthrough capability that enables Maxar to support critical space domain awareness missions for government and commercial customers."

Ghostly view of an infant sun

Another gem from the Hubble Space Telescope is this image of the infant star, HP Tau.

At just 10 million years old, HP Tau is the youngest of its neighbors, residing roughly 550 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. Like a young version of our own sun, HP Tau, is seen at the top of a trio of glittering stars in this Hubble image. These stars sparkle from within a hollow cavity in a billowing cloud of gas and dust, its thick swirls shining in brilliant blues, like a flashlight cutting through the fog.

Related: Enchanting new Hubble Telescope image reveals an infant star's sparkle

Another mind-blowing JWST image

Not to be outdone, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured incredibly sharp images of the Horsehead Nebula in April, one of the most iconic celestial bodies in the sky over Earth.

JWST was able to see details of the Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33, that had never before been revealed, showing some regions in a completely new light. The new images show the Horsehead Nebula as turbulent waves of gas rise from the western side of Orion B, a star-forming molecular cloud located 1,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Orion.

Totality!

April was a big month for North America, as a total solar eclipse swept over a stretch of Mexico, the United States, and Canada thousands of miles long.

The eclipse was one of the most-watched eclipses ever. All of North America and Central America experienced a partial solar eclipse, but only those located within the path of totality — an approximately 115-mile (185-kilometer) wide and 10,000-mile-long (16,000 kilometers) route — saw the moon completely obscure the sun.

Spectacular images of the eclipse were captured along the way, including this one from astrophotographer Miguel Claro, who wrote a step by step look at how such a mesmerizing solar eclipse photo was captured.

Eclipse Across America

During the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, the path of totality crossed four states in Mexico (Sinaloa, Nayarit, Durango and Coahuila) before sweeping over 15 U.S. states (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine) and seven Canadian Provinces (Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland).

Pictured above is the quaint downtown of Bloomington, Indiana underneath a progression of the sun and moon into and out of totality. Scenes like this were watched in hundreds of small towns and cities as the rare celestial event moved across the sky.

About yesterday...

My favorite photo of the eclipse, humbly, is this one I took during totality. This was shot as the sun's rays were peaking out from behind the moon to create a "diamond ring" effect.

In that moment, I took advantage of the opportunity to pull out a diamond ring of my own, and ask my partner to marry me. She said, "Yes!" Needless to say, some pretty incredible moments were captured during the total solar eclipse of 2024.

Our galactic center

Also in 2024, astronomers captured the first view of polarized light and magnetic fields that surround Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milly Way galaxy.

The historic observation was made with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), and revealed magnetic field similarities with those surrounding the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87.

SpaceX's Starship Soars on Flight 3

March 2024 saw the epic third test flight of SpaceX's Starship megarocket. The 400-foot-tall rocket soared above the southernmost point in Texas as spectators cheered on from beaches, boats and rooftops in nearby cities and towns.

SpaceX conduced four Starship launches in 2024, and has many more planned for next year. The rocket company is hoping to launch Starship at least 25 times next year, after petitioning the Federal Aviation Administration for in increase in the rocket's launch frequency.

Star nursery tendrils

Another JWST marvel from 2024 was this image, taken by the telescope's NIRcam instrument. It shows a near-infrared view of a star-forming region known as NGC 604, which sits in the Triangulum galaxy 2.7 million light-years from Earth. The image shows arms of gas and dust, which shelter more than 200 of the hottest and most massive types of stars.

A last look at Ingenuity

NASA's Ingenuity was officially grounded after its last flight on Jan. 18, this year. But the little Mars-copter-that-could lasted well beyond its mission parameters and the expectations of its operators.

Blowing past the mission's 5 initial flights, Ingenuity completed a total of 72 flights on the red planet before finally calling it quits. This image was shot by NASA's Perseverance rover, as the Martian explorer moves out of range of Ingenuity.

Gone but not forgotten, Ingenuity completed the first flight of a powered aircraft on a planet other than Earth, and inspired more plans for helicopter drones to be sent to Mars. Recently, NASA revealed that Ingenuity had "one final gift" to give. The downed copter will continue on as a weather station, recording telemetry, taking images and storing them on board.

Stage separation to the moon!

The fiery tear in the rich, dark blue of the night sky in this photograph captured by Trevor Mahlman in February, is a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, captured during the moments of stage separation as the vehicle's main booster burns back toward Earth and the second stage streaks onward to space.

This launch occurred early in morning February 15, lifting off from Pad 39A, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. The payload was Intuitive Machines' "Odysseus" Nova-C moon lander, which made history as the first commercial mission to touchdown on the lunar surface.

So, there you have it. Twenty-four space images for 2024. Next year is shaping up for even more discovery, spaceflight, sky watching and astrophotography. So, as always, keep looking up.

Submit your story photos! If you capture an incredible space photo and would like to share it with Space.com's readers, send photos, videos, comments, and your name, location and content usage permission release to spacephotos@space.com.

An incoming coronal mass ejection (CME) could spread aurora cheer this Christmas. Its anticipated arrival is predicted to spark minor geomagnetic storm conditions with auroras possible at high latitudes, such as northern Michigan and Maine.

The CME left the sun on Dec. 23 during a powerful M8.9 solar flare eruption and is currently on track to land Earth with a glancing blow.

When CMEs strike Earth's magnetosphere, they bring electrically charged particles called ions that collide with our planet's magnetic field. These collisions can spark geomagnetic storms. During these storms, ions collide with atmospheric gases, releasing energy that manifests as light. This creates the stunning displays known as the northern lights, or Aurora Borealis, in the Northern Hemisphere, and the southern lights, or Aurora Australis, in the Southern Hemisphere.

NOAA classifies geomagnetic storms using a G-scale, which ranks their intensity from G1 (minor) to G5 (extreme). The recent geomagnetic storm watch issued by NOAA is currently rated as a G1, indicating minor storm conditions.

When will the geomagnetic storm occur?

Current forecasts predict possible G1 conditions on Dec. 25. Check out NOAA's 3-day forecast for the latest timings.

Space weather physicist Tamitha Skov has provided an informative space weather forecast for the days ahead in a post on X.

Keep in mind that space weather, much like Earth's weather, is unpredictable and difficult to forecast. Even though geomagnetic storm warnings at this level are rare, they can occasionally amount to nothing.

Northern Hemisphere aurora forecast courtesy of the Met Office

If you're interested in tracking space weather and knowing when and where to spot auroras, download a space weather app that provides forecasts based on your location. One option I use is "My Aurora Forecast & Alerts," available for both iOS and Android. However, any similar app should work well. I also use the "Space Weather Live" app, which is available on iOS and Android, to get a deeper understanding of whether the current space weather conditions are favorable for aurora sightings.

To start, there are the usual suspects, like electrons, protons, quarks and neutrinos. But if those particles aren't strange enough for you, I'm here to help.

There are other particles that are so rare, we're not even sure they exist. Here are five of the weirdest, rarest hypothetical particles in the universe.

Dark photon

Everybody loves the photon. It gets along with so many other particles. It has an infinite range. It makes flashlights work. But it may not be the only kind of photon out there. Enter the dark photon, which is like a regular photon but just … dark.

The motivation for the dark photon comes from the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is some invisible form of matter that makes up most of the mass of almost every galaxy and, all told, accounts for roughly 25% of the universe's energy. Dark energy is responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe and makes up 70% of the contents of the cosmos.

Among the many questions facing cosmologists is just how simple or complicated these dark components are. We know that regular matter is fascinatingly complex, with a wide variety of particles and forces at play. Is the dark sector, as it's called, big, simple and dumb, or is it as rich and varied as the light side of the universe?

If the dark sector is complex, there may be additional forces of nature that operate only between dark matter and/or dark energy, and dark photons would be the carriers of those forces. No searches have discovered any evidence for dark photons yet, but we still have a lot to learn.

Related: Hypothetical 'dark photons' could shed light on mysterious dark matter

Curvaton

Let's go back to the earliest moments of the Big Bang. Cosmologists believe that our universe underwent a period of incredibly rapid expansion known as inflation. Powering this event was some mysterious substance in the universe, known as the "inflaton" (which was basically like dark energy on steroids).

Inflation is still hypothetical, but it does have one powerful prediction under its belt: cosmic structure. The statistical properties of structures in our universe match what we expect from cosmic inflation, so we believe this dramatic event laid the foundation for the stars, galaxies and clusters that would emerge later.

Despite this success, inflation has some thorny issues. For one, it's difficult to build models of inflation that are "natural" — in the sense that they start and end without any fine-tuning — and still generate the seeds of cosmic structure. To get around this, some theorists have proposed a companion to the inflaton, dubbed the curvaton.

The job of the curvaton is to sit around and wait while inflation does its thing. Then, the curvaton steps in and lays the groundwork for structure. The advantage of this approach is that inflation models can be more "natural," because we're not forcing one entity — the inflaton — to do all the work in the early universe.

The downside of this approach is that we're replacing one hypothetical entity with two, which doesn't exactly ease concerns that maybe we're getting the whole inflation picture wrong. But the curvaton is worth investigating anyway, because research in that direction might open up a promising avenue. Besides, it has a really cool name.

Glueball

The carrier of the strong force is a particle known as the gluon, of which there are nine varieties.

Here's the fun thing about gluons: They can feel the strong force, too. So our best models of the proton tell us that gluons are hot messes of strong force interactions. And they're not the only hot messes of strong force interactions. The protons and neutrons have three quarks (and gluons), and there's a whole family of particles called mesons, which contain two quarks (and gluons).

So we've got all these combinations of quarks and gluons held together with the strong nuclear force. But if gluons feel the strong nuclear force anyway, why don't we just skip the quark part? Why make it so complicated? Just keep it simple. And that's how we came up with the glueball, which is a hefty particle made of nothing more than a collection of gluons … glued together.

What makes the glueball so elusive is that it's incredibly ephemeral, with a lifetime of less than a microsecond. This isn't that surprising; every combination of quarks and gluons, except the proton, is also unstable in isolation. But the glueballs are expected to have exceptionally short lifetimes; otherwise, we would've seen them just floating around in our backyards by now.

But glueballs also have predicted masses in the range of just about every other composite particle. So we might be making it but not realizing it, because when we see a surprising new particle in a collider, we typically get to quantify only its mass. This means we have observed plenty of candidate glueballs going back to 2013, but what we saw could also be other particles that are much less exotic.

Nowadays, there are entire experiments, like GlueX, devoted to finding glueballs. It's the last major prediction of the Standard Model still standing, so it's worth searching for these odd particles.

X17

We've been trying to move past the Standard Model of particle physics pretty much since we invented it. And in 2015, physicists got a signal that something might be wrong,at ATOMKI, the Hungarian Institute for Nuclear Research.

The team had assembled an apparatus to search for dark photons. The setup involved firing protons at lithium-7, which then transformed into beryllium-8 nuclei, which then decayed and produced pairs of electrons and positrons. Those pairs flew off at various angles, and scientists used nuclear physics calculations to predict the spread of those angles. If they got more of those particles than they expected, it might have been because dark photons were getting involved.

And indeed, the Hungarian team found extra electrons and positrons. To recreate the signal, there had to be a new particle with a mass of 17 MeV (34 times the mass of the electron), so this mysterious new particle got a name: X17.

In the following years, the Hungarian team has built up an impressive list of accomplishments, all of which point to the reality of this new particle, including statistical significance of over 6 sigma, and work with collaborators to find similar signals.

Nonetheless, most of the mainstream physics community has doubts about X17. All of the "independent" confirmations have some sort of fingerprint from the original Hungarian team, and nobody outside that network has been able to reproduce the effect.

Also, there are some relatively plausible explanations for the anomaly that arise from the detector setup's geometry. Given that we don't see any new evidence for the particle, as much as I would like X17 to exist, I'm not going to get my hopes up yet.

Preon

You've got your elements, like helium and aluminum. They are made of fundamental particles, like the proton, neutron and electron. But those are made of even smaller things: quarks. So why stop there? Maybe what we call the fundamental particles of the universe are really composite structures of even smaller objects, the preons (as in "pre-quarks," not to be confused with prions.

One of the biggest motivations for preons is that many particles are extremely similar to each other but differ only in some small way. For example, the electron and positron differ only in charge, and the electron and the muon differ only in mass. We currently have no explanation for these nearly identical properties, so we suspect they may arise from some other interactions.

Preons have been proposed to explain … well, just about every outstanding problem in the Standard Model, from why there are only three generations to what dark matter is. But nothing ever seems to stick, and that's because no experiment has given any hint that quarks and leptons are composite particles. We try as hard as we can to smash them apart, but they just keep being themselves.

Scientists are hoping NASA's Parker Solar Probe will get a unique taste of the sun's wrath on Christmas Eve, when it will swoop within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun's surface — the closest yet a human-made object has ever gotten to our star. At this record distance, the probe is already expected to cut through plumes of plasma still rooted to the sun, akin to a surfer diving under a crashing wave.

The sun reached its most turbulent phase in its 11-year cycle just two months ago, so scientists are hoping it will unleash at least one solar flare that serendipitously passes through the same pocket of space as the Parker Solar Probe. Far from damaging the spacecraft, this would allow the probe to gather rare data about how the sun's charged particles are accelerated to near-light speeds and dissect the dynamics of space weather — insights that would be valuable not only for understanding our sun but also for studying stars elsewhere in the universe, scientists say.

Since Parker Solar Probe launched in 2018 on a historic and audacious mission to decode some of the sun's deepest secrets, it watched our star transition from a calm, so-called solar minimum to its current stormy state, marked by back-to-back solar flares this summer that sparked the strongest auroras in 500 years.

"The sun is doing different things that it did when we first launched," Nicholeen Viall, who is a co-investigator for the WISPR instrument onboard Parker Solar Probe, told reporters earlier this month at the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). "That is really cool because it is making different types of solar winds and solar storms."

Viall and the rest of the mission team are confident the spacecraft will withstand solar flares, largely because the probe easily survived its strongest flare so far in September 2022, which occurred on the back side of the sun and out of sight of mission control.

"The Parker Solar Probe is designed for that," Nour Raouafi, who is the project scientist for the mission, told Space.com in a recent interview. The spacecraft "dealt with it beautifully," he added, about the 2022 solar flare. Flying in the wake of that flare, Parker's data confirmed the decades-old hypothesis that a coronal mass ejection acts like a vacuum cleaner, clearing dust out of its path and leaving behind a near-perfect vacuum.

Any flare barreling toward Parker Solar Probe will be seen not by the spacecraft itself, which will be incommunicado with mission control, but by other sun-observing spacecraft like the European Solar Orbiter. Scientists will know how Parker Solar Probe dealt with any such events when the spacecraft gets back in touch with mission control through a critical beacon tone on Dec. 27, followed by images as well as science data in the New Year.

The sun's turbulence is now such that the four science instruments onboard Parker may soon even study powerful solar flares occurring on top of each other, providing scientists with up-close data about the chaotic workings of our star.

"We are preparing to make history," Raouafi said at the AGU meeting. "Parker Solar Probe is opening our eyes to a new reality about our star."

A brilliant fireball lit up the night sky over some southern states in the United States this weekend, but that was no meteor. It was Chinese space junk.

The fireball, which streaked over parts of Missisippi, Arkansa and Missouri on Saturday night (Dec. 21), was the death knell of a defunct Chinese commercial Earth imaging satellite called Superview 1-02 (or GaoJing 1-02) as it burned up in Earth's atmosphere. Video of the Chinese space junk burning up shows it as several streaks of objects flaring up in the night sky.

"The commercial imaging satellite 高景一号02星 (GaoJing 1-02, Superview 1-02), operated by Beijing-based SpaceView (北京航天世景信息技术有限公司) reentered above New Orleans at 0408 UTC Dec 22 (1008 pm CST Dec 21) heading northbound towards MS, AR, MO and was widely observed," wrote Jonathan McDowell, an astrosphycist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tracks satellite launches and reentries, in a post on X. He also shared the apparent track of the space debris.

The fireball was visible to stargazers across at least 12 states across the southern U.S., with the American Meteor Society receiving at least 120 reports from Texas to Florida, and as far north as Indiana and Illinois.

Christopher Rainer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Jackson, Mississippi, told Channel 3 WLBT news that his agency received some reports of the fireball after 10 p.m. local time on Dec. 21. At the time, NWS officials believed it was a meteor breaking apart in the upper atmosphere that posed no danger to people on the ground, WLBT reported.

The Superview 1-02 satellite was one of two Superview 1 satellites launched into orbit in December 2016 for SpaceView by a Chinese Long March 2D rocket. (The other satellite was, perhaps unsurprisingly, called Superview 1-01.) The launch was not without its hiccups.

Instead of deploying the two satellites into a circular orbit about 330 miles (530 kilometers) above Earth, the satellites were placed into elliptical (or oval-shaped) orbits that ranked from 133 miles to 326 miles (214-524 km) above Earth, according to tracking data from the U.S. Air Force Joint Space Operations Center. Over time, the two satellites were able to gradually raise their orbits to begin their mission.

The SuperView 1 satellites were China's first-ever commercial high-resolution Earth observations satellites. Each weighed about 1,235 pounds (560 kilograms) and carried cameras with a resolution of about 0.5 per pixel.

SpaceView launched a series of additional SuperView satellites in subsequent years to build up an Earth-imaging constellation of spacecraft.

For eager eyes anticipating his arrival, the NORAD Tracks Santa website and app are here to provide Christmas revelry by following exactly where in the world the Big Red Guy is and where his course will bring him next. This interactive simulation app is available for Android or Apple iOS devices and can be downloaded for free at NORAD’s official site. 

Incorporated into the main NORAD Tracks Santa homepage counting down Santa's shove-off from the North Pole and providing an up-to-the-minute location spotter starting on Christmas Eve, yuletide users can explore the North Pole, play fun daily games in The Arcade, listen to Santa's favorite Xmas tunes at The Music Stage, read stories of Santa's magic sleigh and holiday traditions in The Library, watch films about Santa and NORAD at The Theater, purchase Santa-themed items and NORAD gear in The Gift Shop, and learn all about NORAD's history and its ongoing mission.

"While the tradition of tracking Santa began purely by accident, NORAD continues to track Santa," the website states. "We're the only organization that has the technology, the qualifications, and the people to do it. And, we love it! NORAD is honored to be Santa's official tracker!"

Kris Kringle fans can track Santa's annual flight on the official website, Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube and the NORAD Tracks Santa Claus mobile app. Kids (and childlike adults) can also phone a volunteer-manned hotline number to reach the NORAD Tracks Santa Operation Center on Dec. 24: 877-HI-NORAD (877-446-6723).

Based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, The North America Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has been entrusted with tracking Santa as he circles the globe for nearly 70 years.

By some accounts, this Santa Tracker initiative kicked off by complete accident in 1955, when a Colorado Springs Sears printed a newspaper announcement telling children to call a certain phone number to chat with Santa. That number was misprinted, and the connection was actually routed to the predecessor of NORAD, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD). Crew Commander Colonel Harry Shoup took the misdialed call but realized the positive PR factor involved and told his officers to deliver fictional tracking updates on Santa Claus and his sleigh.

Nowadays, NORAD employs its North Warning System radar system, early warning satellites, and 47 installations strung along North America's northern border for high-tech Xmas detection. Candy canes and hot chocolate not required.

NORAD Tracks Santa is live online and begins watching Santa at 4 a.m. ET (0900 GMT) on Dec. 24.

Around a thousand centaurs are currently known, but the 135-mile-wide (218-km-wide) Chiron was the first to be discovered in 1977. Centaurs are thought to have originated out in the frozen realm beyond Neptune, but later moved in-system after their orbits were perturbed by gravitational resonances with the ice giant. Because they move closer to the sun, solar heating can cause certain ices to sublimate, forming a gaseous halo or coma around the centaur, a bit like a comet.

Charles Schambeau of the University of Central Florida describes Chiron as an oddball among all the other centaurs, and even among trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), which have intriguing stories of their own. "It has periods where it behaves like a comet, it has rings of material around it, and potentially a debris field of small dust or rocky material orbiting around it," he said in a statement.

New James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations of Chiron, led by Schambeau and Noemí Pinilla-Alonso of the University of Oviedo in Spain, have found that the composition of Chiron's surface ices are quite unlike any other centaur observed thus far. While none of the ices on their own are particularly unusual, the combination of them on Chiron is a surprise.

The JWST found carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide ice on the surface, and carbon dioxide and methane gas in Chiron's thin coma. The presence and abundance of methane is consistent with the substance sublimating from ice on an area of the surface that has been exposed to the greatest amount of solar heating. While its temperature from the sun never climbs above -220 degrees Fahrenheit (-140 degrees Celsius), this is still warm enough to cause these ices to sublimate.

Furthermore, the action of the sun's radiation on these ices spurs chemical reactions that produce organic byproducts such as acetylene, ethane, propane, as well as various carbon oxides, all of which were found as ices on Chiron's surface by the JWST.

"Discovering which gases are part of the coma and their different relationships with the ices on the surface help us learn the physical and chemical properties, such as the thickness and the porosity of the ice layer, its composition and how irradiation is affecting it," said Pinilla-Alonso.

Centaurs, and trans-Neptunian objects in general, are believed to be pristine; they've remained untouched since they formed 4.5 billion years ago at the dawn of the solar system. As such, they're like time machines that give us a glimpse into how and what the solar system was made from, where certain objects formed in the protoplanetary disk around the young sun, and whether those objects have migrated from that location since.

Active centaurs such as Chiron are especially precious because they reveal much more than inert bodies.

"They are undergoing transformation driven by solar heating and they provide a unique opportunity to learn about the surface and subsurface layers," said Pinilla-Alonso. "What is unique about Chiron is that we can observe both the surface, where most of the ices can be found, and the coma, where we see the gases that are originating from the surface or just below it."

Chiron's 50-year elliptical orbit around the sun saw it pass through aphelion — its greatest distance from the sun at 18.87 astronomical units (2.8 billion kilometers, or 1.75 billion miles) in 2021. It next reaches perihelion in 2047, when it will get within 8.5 astronomical units (1.27 billion kilometers, or 790 million miles) of the sun, which is just inside the orbit of Saturn. As it moves closer to the sun over the next 20 years or so, Chiron will grow brighter and more active, allowing more accurate observations of the abundance and nature of its ices, its organic chemistry and how solar irradiation and sunlight can affect its freezing surface. And there is much still to learn.

"Based on our new JWST data, I'm not sure we have a standard centaur," said Pinilla-Alonso. "Every active centaur that we are observing with JWST shows some peculiarity. There must be something that explains why they appear to behave differently or something that is common between them all that we cannot yet see."

Alas, Chiron and all its fellow centaurs are in a transitory phase, and over the next million years its ultimate fate will be decided. Either Jupiter's family will scatter it in-system again, where it will become a Jupiter-family comet with an orbital period of less than 20 years, or it will be thrown back into the Kuiper Belt, rejected from the inner solar system by the gatekeeper, Jupiter itself. It's impossible to say which fate will befall it, but as is fitting for an object named after a figure from Greek mythology, its destiny will be in the lap of the gods.

The new JWST findings were published in December in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

"Doctor Who: Joy to the World" continues the veteran sci-fi show's two-decade run as a Christmas TV institution. The Time Lord has been a fixture of the BBC's festive schedules ever since 2005's "The Christmas Invasion", and this year is no different.

The last time we saw Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor, he'd just defeated Sutekh and left companion Ruby Sunday back on Earth to get to know her recently discovered birth mother. Now traveling solo in the TARDIS, the Doctor pays a visit to the Time Hotel, where guests can open doors to any period in history. And dinosaurs.

Joining Gatwa for this year's festive adventure is "Derry Girls" and "Bridgerton" star Nicola Coughlan, whose titular Joy gets far more than she bargains for when she checks in for a holiday break. "Who" fans will also be excited by the return of former showrunner Steven Moffat, who's back on writing duties for this year's Christmas special, having also scripted the excellent "Boom" earlier this year.

This guide explains how to watch "Doctor Who: Joy to the World" wherever you are in the world on Christmas Day — though we'll admit its reach stops just short of the entirety of space and time.

How to watch 'Doctor Who: Joy to the World' for free in the UK

How to watch 'Doctor Who: Joy to the World' from anywhere

If you're a UK resident abroad right now, you can still watch "Doctor Who: Joy to the World" for FREE on BBC iPlayer. Unfortunately, geoblocking restrictions mean that iPlayer doesn't work outside of the UK, but a VPN can solve that problem...

Downloading a VPN allows you to stream your favourite content from anywhere. These simple pieces of software can change your IP address, allowing you to access on-demand content or live TV just as you would at home...

How to watch 'Doctor Who: Joy to the World' in the US and elsewhere

'Doctor Who: Joy to the World' official trailer

Take a sneak peek at what you're getting for Christmas with the "Joy to the World" trailer...

'Doctor Who: Joy to the World': FAQs

It's been a busy year on the sun, as it officially entered the peak of its roughly 11-year cycle of activity, known as solar maximum. In 2024, the sun launched over 50 X-class solar flares — the most powerful type of solar flare — at Earth.

Solar flares are categorized by the level of X-rays they produce in a specific wavelength range (1 to 8 angstroms). Solar flare classes follow a logarithmic scale, with each flare class — C, M and X — 10 times stronger than the previous one. Solar flares can also unleash giant clouds of plasma known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which can cause geomagnetic storms and widespread auroras.

The video above shows observations from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA). The left panels show emissions from AIA 131 Å, and the right from AIA 171 Å. These reveal plasma at approximately 18 million and 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (10 million and 1 million degrees Celsius), respectively. Below, we take a look at the 10 strongest solar flares between Jan. 1 and Dec. 10, 2024.

10. X3.38 — Feb. 9

This X3.38 flare, which occurred over the southwestern edge of the sun, would have measured much higher if most of the emission had not been blocked by the edge of the sun. This flare shows a good example of a "coronal wave," as coronal material in AIA 171 Å emission is seen to be almost "blown out of the way" by the original flare.

During this massive flare on Feb. 9, as with almost all X-class flares, the bright and concentrated signal produced an "X" or "star" shape diffraction pattern, which emanated from the bright flare site in AIA 131 Å emission. This diffraction pattern is an artifact of the telescope camera; it did not actually occur on the sun.

9. X3.48 — May 15

This is the first of four solar flares on this list to have originated from solar active region AR 13664.

AR 13664 was a famous highly productive active region, producing 12 X-class solar flares in just six days. The May 15 flare was the final X-class flare visible from Earth, and it would have measured higher if it had not already been partly obscured by the western edge of the sun.

As the active region rotated around the back of the sun and reemerged into view two weeks later, it continued to produce large flares (under a new active region number). Observations from the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter also revealed large flares from the region during the period it was hidden from Earth's view.

8. X3.98 — May 10

This solar flare also originated from active region AR 13664. The flare produced a strong Earth-directed CME — one of several to launch within a 48-hour window. The CME erupted from the perfect location on the sun to cause maximum impact on Earth.

As the series of CMEs arrived at our planet on May 11-12, they produced a G5 geomagnetic storm — the strongest geomagnetic storm since 2003. This resulted in widespread auroras at low latitudes that were viewed by millions across the world.

7. X4.52 – May 6

Another flare earlier in May was launched from active region AR 13663 — one active region lower than the source of the two flares above. While AR 13664 was busy producing eruptive flares in the sun's southern hemisphere, AR 13663 unleashed a series of X-class solar flares from the northern hemisphere. Most of these flares, including this May 6 event, did not produce notable Earth-directed coronal mass ejections.

6. X4.54 — Sept. 14

This solar flare produced a strong CME, directed over the sun's eastern limb. For flares around this magnitude and above, you can notice the pixel saturation overflowing into neighboring pixels and producing periodic sharp and jagged saturation features that bleed out above and below the bright flare site.

5. X5.89 — May 11

Just like the flare on May 6, this event originated in AR 13664. This flare also produced a coronal mass ejection, which formed part of the chain of CMEs that contributed to the extreme and long-duration G5 geomagnetic storm aimed at Earth.

Because the May 11 flare occurred closer to the limb than the earlier flare from the same active region, it was slightly less optimally placed to impact us head-on.

4. X6.37 – Feb. 22

Not all strong solar flares are interesting. Although this one clocked in at X6.37, it did not produce any Earth-directed CMEs and was not particularly noteworthy.

3. X7.10 — Oct. 1

This flare is one of two on this list to originate from active region AR 13842, alongside the strongest flare on the list.

Neither of the two strongest flares from this active region directed strong geomagnetic storms at Earth. However, smaller X-class flares from this same active region later went on to release the CMEs responsible for a strong G4 geomagnetic storm on Oct. 10, which again caused widespread low-latitude auroras across the world.

This is a good lesson to remember: Solar flare size is only weakly correlated with the potential for a flare-induced CME to create strong auroras. In the case of this active region, the larger flares had a smaller geomagnetic impact than the smaller flares did.

2. X8.79 — May 14

This is the fourth and final flare on this list from active region AR 13664, which has been by far the most X-class-productive active region during this solar cycle (so far). However, unlike the previous flares to erupt from this region, the May 14 flare was confined, without a significant eruption. Because of this, the physical size of the flare appears small, despite the strong X-ray emission.

1. X9.0 — Oct. 3

Finally, the largest flare of the year so far produced an enormous amount of energy — nine times the amount needed to cross the X-class-flare threshold. This was the third-largest solar flare since 2011 and the fifth-largest since 2005.

Will this be the strongest solar flare we see in Solar Cycle 25? As solar maximum continues into 2025, we'll have to wait and see.

Artemis 2, which will send a crew of three Americans and a Canadian astronaut around the moon, was due to launch in September 2025. The mission has now been moved back to April 2026, NASA announced on Dec. 5. Artemis 3 — which is set to put humans on the surface of our nearest celestial neighbor for the first time in more than half a century — has also slipped, from late 2026 to mid-2027.

The latest delays stem, in part, from an issue with the Orion crew spacecraft and its heat shield which was detected after a "skip reentry" during the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission in late 2022.

"We have since determined that while the capsule was dipping in and out of the atmosphere as part of that planned skip entry, heat accumulated inside the heat shield outer layer, leading to gases forming and becoming trapped inside the heat shield," NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said during a Dec. 5 press conference. "This caused internal pressure to build up and led to cracking and uneven shedding of that outer layer."

Related: NASA delays Artemis 2 moon mission to 2026, Artemis 3 astronaut landing to mid-2027

Artemis 2 will still use Orion, but with a different reentry trajectory to better manage the resulting heat. "The safety of our astronauts is always first in our decisions," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said.

The delay allows NASA more time to understand and fully address the Orion issue, and also to get the landing systems and other aspects like lunar extravehicular activity suits ready for the missions. It will also allow for improvements and increased safety. However, it may disrupt the momentum of contractors and suppliers, which is no small matter; a lack of regular flight cadence can lead to inefficiencies and a loss of expertise.

But most notably, the announcement of the delays to the Artemis missions comes at a time of flux for NASA. It brings a level of uncertainty to the missions themselves, their architecture and perhaps even the entire Artemis program.

Donald Trump was elected as president of the United States in November and is set to return to the White House in January. He campaigned on a platform of cutting budgets and lowering taxes. That, in itself, could spell trouble for NASA programs deemed costly or inefficient.

One aspect of Artemis rumored to be immediately under threat is the Space Launch System (SLS), the giant rocket designed to launch Orion to the moon. The launcher has been under intense scrutiny for years due to vast cost overruns and numerous delays in development. A mobile launch tower for the SLS has also been afflicted by cost overruns and delays. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in September 2023 described the rocket as "unaffordable" for sustained space exploration.

Trump has publicly nominated Jared Isaacman, a billionaire with two private spaceflights using SpaceX hardware under his belt, to head up NASA. Elon Musk, Trump's wealthiest supporter and an active part of the presidential campaign, is close to the president-elect and is thought to be in a position to influence policy.

That has raised the possibility that a new Trump administration could replace SLS with Starship from Musk's SpaceX. Starship is already part of the architecture for future Artemis missions, and its reusability and cost-effectiveness, if proven, would give it major advantages over the expensive, expendable SLS. Such a move would not be straightforward, but the new delays may make this more possible.

In terms of international competition, the delay of Artemis 3 to 2027 further narrows the margin between NASA's return to the moon and China's attempt to put its first astronauts on the lunar surface. Beijing has committed to a mission to put two astronauts on the moon before 2030 and is actively working on all of the elements needed to achieve the feat, including a new rocket, spacecraft, lander and launch pad.

Making the first crewed landing on the moon this century would be a symbolic victory for either country. It would also demonstrate momentum and technological prowess, and could provide the perception of leadership in space.

One further possibility, however, is that NASA drops the moon as the goal, looking deeper into space. While NASA sees the moon as a stepping stone to Mars, it could, potentially, look to skip a step.

Musk has been very vocal about his plans to put humans on Mars, and Starship is integral to this effort. An administration close to Musk could also, potentially, decide to back Starship and switch focus from the moon to the Red Planet. Again, such decisions will be a complex interplay of individuals and institutions such as Congress, making big changes difficult to manufacture.

But big changes are possible, and they would have geopolitical ramifications. Both the U.S. and China are working to secure partners for their respective Artemis and International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) programs, and ending Artemis could give China's efforts a massive boost.

There would also be consequences for NASA's partnerships with the European Space Agency and its member states, Japan, the United Arab Emirates and more, which are engaged in Artemis and projects including the lunar Gateway. It was also the first Trump administration that kicked off Artemis, and the incoming president may well want to oversee a triumphant return to the moon.

NASA officials underlined on Dec. 5 that the Artemis program is viewed as a cornerstone for advancing human exploration and for the moon to Mars and beyond. The agency is aiming to maintain a consistent flight cadence, while reducing gaps between missions and incorporating lessons learned. However, change may be coming to the agency's plans for Artemis and beyond.

In the new trailer for director James Gunn's summer of 2025 "Superman" project, starring David Corenswet in the titular role, it appears that more members of the Man of Steel's universe will be explored including Krypto, Mister Terrific, and Metamorpho.

But one brief scene that has many non-geeks puzzled as to the identity of a certain character is an emotional shot of Superman in anguish kneeling beside a dying broken robot and clutching its metallic hand.

We believe this android is likely to be Kelex, a deep cut from the "Superman" comic books who was also featured momentarily in Zack Snyder's "Man of Steel" from 2013. There in a cameo with Jor-El, Lara, and fellow robot, Kelor, we see the benevolent machine when Kal-El is born before Krypton dies, and a version aboard the Kryptonian Scout Ship in the Arctic.

Who is Kelex?

Comic book aficionados and certified experts on Superman lore will know that Kelex is the robotic custodian of the Fortress of Solitude and an artificial being serving the House of El prior to Krypton’s annihilation when baby Supes was launched to Earth.

This hovering helper 'bot was first introduced John Bryne's six-issue "The Man of Steel" miniseries released back in 1986, and can also be seen in an altered form in eleven episodes of CW's "Arrowverse" series, "Supergirl," which ran from 2015-2021.

Peering into the interiors of the fresh teaser footage, you can easily discern the architecture of a colossal icy structure that is certain to be the Fortress of Solitude, Superman's crystalline stronghold that the Kryptonian Service Robot protects.

Other theories

Alan Tudyk might also be providing the voice for Kelex, which would end speculation regarding his undefined role in "Superman," but that remains to be seen (or heard) at this point. Since he's already a voice performer for Clayface in James Gunn's "Creature Commandos," there’s a good chance our rumor mongering is correct. It's unclear as to the exact continuity of this short scene within the greater narrative of "Superman," but we'd guess it's after an enemy attack or Luthorian invasion.

Some fans out there have suggested this robot might be Amazo or Metallo but that's far-fetched, and we doubt Supes would be bereaved of those supervillains' demise.

Kelex making the grade and being included within this big-budget rebooted "Superman" saga as a link to Kal-El’s Kryptonian heritage is encouraging, as it seems that James Gunn is deadly serious about his screenplay's detailed lore.

"Superman" soars into theaters on July 11, 2025.

A bright streak of light in the pre-dawn skies above the U.K. tomorrow morning (Dec. 24) could easily be mistaken for Santa Claus getting an early start to his Christmas deliveries — but the glowing trail of light actually belongs to the International Space Station (ISS) making one of its routine laps of Earth. The ISS will also be visible early on Christmas morning, coinciding with Santa's journey back to the North Pole.

Weather permitting, the space station will be visible under clear skies for about six minutes, starting at 6:54 a.m. GMT. It will appear 16° above the western horizon, and travel across the sky at a maximum height of 82° above the horizon before disappearing 10° above the eastern horizon, which should make it visible in many parts of the UK, according to NASA's Spot the Station page. The ISS will be visible again on Dec. 25, at 6:06 a.m. GMT, for about four minutes. It will follow a similar trajectory as the previous day, appearing 57° above the western horizon, and traveling across the sky at a maximum height of 89° above the horizon before disappearing 10° above the eastern horizon.

Related: 10 Christmas space facts to get you into the festive spirit

The ISS is visible to the naked eye as it orbits the Earth at around 250 miles (400 kilometers). It travels at a speed of about 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour) so that as it passes overhead, it often appears as a bright moving star, unmistakable against the backdrop of the early morning sky. And, coinciding with the holiday, the space station could easily double as Santa's sleigh to innocent eyes.

To see the space station pass overhead, it's recommended that viewers find a clear, unobstructed spot with as little light pollution as possible. A telescope or binoculars are not necessary, as the ISS will be visible as a bright light moving steadily across the sky to the naked eye. In fact, the space station is typically the brightest object in the sky (except for the moon). The light we see from Earth is actually ​​sunlight reflected off the solar panels on the side of the orbiting lab.

The ISS orbits Earth once every 90 minutes, which means it circles the planet 16 times each day. While Dec. 24 offers an optimal time to see the space station in the early morning and soak in the wonder and magic of Santa leading up to Christmas, there will be other opportunities to catch the orbiting lab as it passes overhead. NASA's Spot the Station page can help viewers determine when the ISS can be seen from anywhere around the world.

For the astronauts aboard the space station, the holidays are celebrated in a uniquely special way, with festive meals, decorations and even video calls to loved ones back on Earth.

We kick off this shorter installment than last week with the Down Deepers highly pissed off at the Raiders on the stairs, yelling and chanting through an imposing barred partition on Level 130 with a chaotic chorus of "Let them through." Their regular food deliveries are being intentionally held back since they're harboring Knox and Shirley who've been framed for Judge Meadow's death.

Over in Walker's pad, Shirley tends to Knox’s wounds as they pledge to get Carla back, the Head of Supply that's being held in detention and interrogated for being a part of Mechanical's rebellious coalition. Knox and Shirley visit the forge, where some of his friends reveal a small arsenal of homemade pikes, spears, clubs, and armored chest protectors. Time to ante up and kick in!

To add to their misery, the Down Deeper's current food supply is being tainted by someone within, as their lettuce, fruit, meat, and eggs are being laced with powdered rat poison. Shirley addresses upset Mechanical residents in the cafeteria and swears they didn't murder Meadows.

Up top with Bernard and Lukas, the devious IT Head revels in his plan to starve the accomplices out. In a killer line, he relates an interesting human truth that "Only nine missed meals separate a functioning society from chaos." Watching his massive bank of video screens with the angry mob clashing with the Raiders, there seems to be more than a hint of veracity to that intriguing statement.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Billings messages his wife and orders up a doctor for Kennedy, who still has a bullet lodged in his chest. Juliette's dad, Dr. Nichols, makes his way down past the barricade under false pretenses, past the Raiders, and administers aid to Kennedy by safely plucking out the offending projectile and bandaging the wound.

With the enforced barricade on Level 130 stopping their food supply, Shirley suggests that they try to reposition that barrier on Level 120, which would give them access to one of the Lower Midst agricultural farms on Level 122. Walker agrees to help Billings and Deputy Hank regarding the Meadow's homicide but only if they determine the condition of her beloved Carla.

Over in IT, control-crazed Bernard consults with Lukas who is hard at work trying to decode Salvador Quinn’s cryptic letter by shifting some of the letters backwards or forwards, but it's a stubborn problem.

Facing certain starvation, the Down Deepers march up the stairs to the barricade with their hand-tooled weapons, an industrial drill, and a concrete-cutting saw. It's swiftly determined that they're up to no good! A cable and winch are used to rip down the steel barricade and a surge of rebels storm up the stairs as the Raiders fall back. They reach Level 120, their objective, and there's a tense standoff. A new boundary is established and agreed upon by overmatched Security Head Rick Amundsen.

As promised in exchange for medical attention, Kennedy spills the beans to Billings on what he knows about the outside world, including what was broadcast by Juliette onto every computer for ten seconds before everything went dark and citizens were told it was a systems reset. Only a handful of people saw the image of a verdant untarnished outside world before Bernard pulled the plug. But Kennedy wrongly believes that this image is not fabricated, which it obviously is.

Then in a creepy unsettling scene, Bernard has a candid one-sided conversation with Judge Meadows' corpse in the morgue. He's worried that over 140 years of stability might instantly crumble under his watch, and he breaks down crying, apologizing for what he felt he must do to restore order.

Billings finally gets the truth from Walker about what Knox and Shirley told her on the specifics of the Judge Meadows frame job. He has them swear on The Pact that this is 100 percent true and when they do, Billings radios Bernard to let him know he has the fugitives. But he won't reveal their location until a complete investigation into Meadow's death is ordered. Bernard responds by cutting all communication as he now realizes he's lost the Sheriff.

Finally, Lukas has made a breakthrough with the confounding Quinn letter, figuring out that it's much more sophisticated than first thought. To have any chance of deciphering it, Bernard swears Lukas in as his official shadow, and mentions that he needs to see The Legacy. Before we’re shown the secret area, we cut back to Silo 17.

In the last minute, we see that Solo rescued Juliette after she passed out just when she found the helmet. He’s mixed her up some antibiotics for her infected arm, but he’s not going to give her back the safety suit and helmet until she helps him fix the groundwater pump that’s flooding the silo!

While the majority of "Barricades" took place in Silo 18 surrounding the clash between Bernard's Judicial Raiders and the Down Deepers, it was nice to drop in on our favorite pair of bickering survivors over in Silo 17 to remind ourselves of the entertaining chemistry these two characters display. This installment was on the brief side, but as we ramp up the action toward the final episodes the plot pieces are being maneuvered into position promising an explosive finish.

Until then, kudos to the Down Deepers for their temporary victory!

The same can't be said for the sun, whose name makes it easy to forget it's really an incomprehensible, scorching star. But on Christmas Eve this year, we'll be acutely reminded of the sun's cosmic nature thanks to a resilient little spacecraft on a spectacular journey through space: the Parker Solar Probe. On Dec. 24 at 6:53 a.m. ET, this conical explorer will fly dangerously close to none other than our glowing yellow sun.

"In 1969, we landed humans on the moon; on Christmas Eve in 2024, we are going to embrace a star," Nour Raouafi, project scientist of the Parker Solar Probe mission, told Space.com.

On Aug. 12, 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe toward the sun with the hopes of decoding a bunch of longstanding solar mysteries — perhaps the most perplexing of which concerns the fact that our star's atmosphere is weirdly hotter than its surface. What's heating it up? It seems unintuitive, doesn't it? In the audience on launch day was the late Dr. Eugene N. Parker, who revolutionized our understanding of solar physics before the solar probe began its expedition and indeed gave Parker its name to begin with; this marked the first time a spacecraft's namesake was present for liftoff.

Then, on Dec. 14, 2021, the agency announced that Parker Solar Probe successfully entered the sun's atmosphere, or corona, getting just about 6.5 million miles from the star's surface. This was monumental in itself, but since then, the spacecraft has continued to get closer and closer over 21 orbits around the sun, leveraging Venus' gravity to propel itself while breaking records left and right. For instance, it is officially the fastest-ever human-made object, reaching speeds pushing 394,736 miles per hour (635,266 kilometers per hour).

On Dec. 24 of this year, however, Parker Solar Probe will complete its closest pass to the sun to date, getting within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the object's surface while zooming at 430,000 mph (690,000 kph). Previous records will be shattered.

"What the Parker Solar Probe is about to do on Christmas Eve of this year is really unparalleled," Raouafi said. "We have been dreaming of this moment for over 16 years."

And, as Raouafi explains, this is likely as close as the probe will be getting.

"Even if technically we can get the spacecraft closer to the sun, we cannot do it because the heat shield is not big enough to protect the spacecraft," he said. "If you get closer, the shadow cone of the heat shield will be narrow, and potentially, parts of the spacecraft will be exposed to direct sunlight — and that's not something we want to do."

In darkness

There's an aspect to Parker Solar Probe's journey that, at first glance, seems like it'd cause a stir among mission members: The spacecraft will be off the grid during the major flyby; we will have no way of contacting it.

Its first proof of life won't arrive before Dec. 27, when a beacon tone will essentially alert the team that Parker Solar Probe survived its trip through the sun's corona and is able to speak. The goods, though (scientific data and images) won't start pouring in until the new year. John Wirzburger, mission systems engineer for Parker Solar Probe, doesn't see this as a major issue. He actually welcomes the silence.

"This has been a great time for people to actually decompress — to take a break — because they know when they come out the other side, we have to get all the science data off and reconfigure the spacecraft," he told Space.com. "So, this encounter is almost like a built-in respite for us."

The dark period of Parker's excursion is of course in part because of the specific trajectory of the probe — it won't be in a great position to relay information back to Earth via NASA's Deep Space Network — but it's also because of the project's scientific goals.

"Because we are so close to the sun, the sun interferes with our communications," Wirzburger said. "But the other thing is, we don't want our communications to interfere with our science collections."

Nevertheless, Raouafi believes Parker Solar Probe's presence will be permeating the room for many scientists, even if through aromas of gingerbread and Scotch tape.

"Trust me, everybody will have in their minds and hearts Parker Solar Probe, and be thinking how that little thing is doing in front of the giant that is our star," he said. "I mean, we have been living with this mission for almost 16 years."

Those thoughts, however, will hopefully echo the Christmas spirit. Like learning to put faith in a child's ability to channel good decisions as they grow up and experience the world, the Parker Solar Probe team's trepidation about sending their robotic explorer so close to the sun has softened into pride over the years.

"Early in the mission, whenever we went close to the sun, I think we were pretty nervous," Raouafi said. "But now we did its 21st orbit, and the system is really doing way better than we thought it would."

No fear; no trembling

The most obvious worst case scenario for Parker Solar Probe in the coming days is probably something like … "Will it explode?" or "Will it just never speak to us again?" Yet neither Raouafi nor Wirzburger are particularly afraid of those outcomes as they say they're very unlikely, especially given the spacecraft's grit and tenacity over the last few years.

"I think the thing that would hurt me the most is not having collected science data through this pass," Wirzburger said, though adding that such pain would only last for the duration of the next orbit: "It's only a three-month hurt from the standpoint of we will jump on it and figure out what needs to be done for orbit 23 in order to remedy that situation."

And in fact, Raouafi is specifically hoping the sun tests Parker Solar Probe's strength as much as possible. The spacecraft launched when our sun was at the beginning of its 11-year solar cycle — a time known as solar minimum, when the sun is at its least active — but it's currently nearing solar maximum, when it's at its most active.

"My hope is the sun will give us one of these big explosions — really humongous explosions — when Parker Solar Probe is so close to it, and let it deal with it," he said. "I'm really hoping for Parker Solar Probe to give us one of the greatest gifts ever."

As to those gifts? Well, the probe has already sprinkled in a few over the last several years. For example, on Sept. 5, 2022, it flew straight through an enormous coronal mass ejection, which you can think of as a blob of plasma that bursts off the sun. This revealed that when one of these events occurs, it literally gives space a deep clean. These ejections appeared to sweep away any and all dust particles in its way, and the mission's crewmembers will be keeping their eyes peeled in case this kind of event is caught on camera again.

"We have other observatories observing the sun at that time; we have data from them. If there is, for example, a big flare or a big coronal mass ejection going toward Parker Solar Probe, we will know about it," Raouafi said. "And you will know about it almost real time, except that we have to wait to learn how Parker Solar Probe dealt with it."

Understanding these events in general is quite important when we consider space weather events; coronal mass ejections, especially when pointed at our planet, can accelerate particles to astonishing speeds. If and when those particles reach us, they can be super hazardous to astronauts in space and pose threats to our power grids.

Fascinatingly, Parker Solar Probe is helping engineers in an indirect way as well; this entire mission is sort of pushing a spacecraft to some of the most extreme limits possible. That means data about the probe's flight patterns and dynamics can inform future missions that may be exposed to intense space environments, like any that intend to explore the regions around Jupiter or Saturn where radiation levels are supremely high.

"We have to actively cool our solar arrays; we pump deionized water through them to keep them cool," Wirzburger said. "Can other missions adopt this? Maybe not for survivability, but for efficiency reasons."

Given all of this stress, you may also think that Parker Solar Probe is pretty worn down (I certainly did) but that couldn't be farther from the truth. Oddly enough, the sun has been acting like a nice car wash for the spacecraft.

"Basically, we take all of our parts and we bake them out to try to remove contaminants and get them nice and clean before we launch them," Wirzburger said. "But we're sending them to one of the best ovens in the solar system, close to the sun."

"We actually believe — especially with the thermal protection system — the shield up top is actually cleaner today than it was when we launched it," he added. "We think the spacecraft probably looks very beautiful and has a very nice white TPS [thermal protection system] on top."

With the exception of some minor dust damage to one of its instruments, and a few micron-size particles that have shot off its body when impacted by classic deep space debris, Parker is in stellar (ha) health.

"The system is basically behaving like we launched it yesterday," Raouafi said. "It's doing so well."

A true star

It isn't just a philosophical wonder that our sun is a star among billions of trillions of others in the universe; it's also a practical concept for astronomers.

"We are using the sun as a laboratory to study other worlds out there," Raouafi said, emphasizing that what Parker Solar Probe finds can remotely explain the intricacies of the billions upon billions of other stars out there in the universe. And indeed, the team hopes that it will continue revealing those intricacies in tandem with the discoveries other scientific fields make about the cosmos for a long, long time.

The probe likely has enough fuel to theoretically allow it to continue working for tens of years — potentially even a hundred years — so long as it remains in orbit around the sun. Per Wirzburger, that fuel supply is enough to maintain the spacecraft's momentum but can't quite allow scientists to alter the spacecraft's trajectory. This means Parker will probably remain a solar explorer, at least for as far as we can see.

"It's not that the spacecraft will be catapulted out and just be thrown out of the solar system or anything like that, or that we're spiraling in," Wirzburger said. "So, for the foreseeable future, we are in our final orbit, and it will maintain that orbit for a long time to come."

"There is a possibility, in the 2032 timeframe, that we potentially could get back to Venus," he speculated. "This is predicated on NASA; on what they would like to do — but the question that comes is, if we can get back to Venus, then what?"

In a sense, when you know it has a finish line, limbo is a nice space to find yourself in because it offers a small sample of reprieve during which your imagination can take charge. Surely, it is the bottomless imaginations of scientists that brought us to this historic moment in the first place.

"When I grew up as a young scientist and I got involved in space," Raouafi said, "I heard about the previous at least one or two attempts of trying to implement a solar probe — and when they all didn't come to fruition, it was really a sour taste.

"For me, the dream was to see this mission happening in my lifetime — but for us to be involved with it so deeply, and also to be leading it, it's more than a dream; we are dreaming with our open eyes."

Update 12/23: The flyby is currently scheduled to occur at 6:53 a.m. ET.

In a new study, astronomers discovered 28 of millinovas in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), two satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. They then discovered that the first of these explosions may have been spotted eight years ago but wasn't identified.

Though the scientists don't quite know how these events generate X-rays, they believe millinovas are caused when dead remnant stars called white dwarfs feed off a swelled-up companion star.

"We came across a group of outbursting variable stars exhibiting very characteristic triangle-shaped symmetrical outbursts that did not resemble any previously known variable stars," team member and University of Warsaw scientist Przemek Mróz told Space.com. "We found this new group of stars by chance."

Related: Gold mine of kilonova explosions forged by neutron stars crashing together

The team was searching 20 years' worth of data from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) for long-duration, light-curving "gravitational microlensing events" that could indicate the presence of black holes left over from after the Big Bang — so-called "primordial black holes" — in the halo of dark matter that surrounds the Milky Way.

"Over the past months, I have been working on a project aiming to search for signatures of massive primordial black holes in the Milky Way dark matter halo," Mróz said. "We did not find any, which demonstrated that such massive black holes might make up less than a few percent of dark matter."

Ordinarily, this may have disappointed the team. But the result led to the discovery of these strange stellar X-ray sources, now known as millinovas (or, more correctly, "millinovae").

Hotter and brighter than the sun

The OGLE data revealed several objects in the LMC and SMC that brightened by between 10 and 20 times over the course of a few months. Some even showed repeated explosive outbursts as frequently as once every few years, while others only exploded once during the observation period.

One in particular, designated OGLE-mNOVA-11, which erupted at the end of last year, allowed the team to perform a detailed study of these objects.

"In November 2023, one of the objects entered an outburst state, so we decided to carry out some additional follow-up observations to study it in more detail," Mróz said. "We obtained a set of optical spectra with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) telescope. We found emission lines from helium, carbon, and nitrogen ionized atoms, indicating extremely high temperatures."

Mróz added that the researchers also observed this object with NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which detected soft X-rays coming from the source. The team theorized that these X-rays were produced by a gas heated to the temperature of over 1 million degrees Fahrenheit (600,000 degrees Celsius).

That is about three times hotter than the hottest known star in the universe, WR 102, and 100 times hotter than the surface temperature of the sun. If OGLE-mNOVA-1 had occurred in our solar system, it would have been 100 times brighter than the sun from our perspective.

What these 28 events resembled was a strange and, until now, seemingly unique cosmic explosion called ASASSN-16oh, which was detected in 2016 by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae and which the team now thinks was a millinova.

"We believe OGLE-mNOVA-11, ASASSN-16oh, and the other 27 objects form a new class of transient X-ray sources," Mróz said. "We have named them millinovae, as their peak brightness is roughly a thousand times lower than that of classical novae."

So what exactly are millinovas, how are they created, and what sets them apart?

A different type of exploding dead star

Despite the lack of similarity between classical novas and dwarf novas, white dwarfs do seem to be behind the millinova mystery.

These stellar remnants are created when stars with masses similar to that of the sun exhaust their fuel for nuclear fusion, the process that converts hydrogen to helium in their cores. As nuclear fusion proceeds in the star's outer layers, it swells up as a so-called "subgiant" or "red giant star."

Unlike more massive stars, whose immense gravity results in the creation of neutron stars or black holes after death, stars like the sun end their lives as smoldering white dwarfs — superdense objects to be sure, but not on the same level.

While this is a peaceful death for solo stars like the sun, many stars have binary partners that can grant them at least a temporary resurrection. That's because some binaries are close enough for the white dwarf to begin pulling material from their companions, causing them to spring back to life.

In other instances, the star and the white dwarf aren't close enough to initiate this mass transfer until the companion star swells up as a red giant and fills its half of an imaginary figure-8 shape, or its "Roche lobe."

Related: White dwarfs: Facts about the dense stellar remnants

White dwarfs obtaining stellar material in this way are already known to be responsible for different nova events. The most famous of these are Type Ia supernovas, in which the white dwarf is obliterated in a runaway thermonuclear explosion after stolen stellar material piles up on its surface (though there are rare events called Type Iax supernovas, in which the white dwarf lives on as a wrecked zombie star).

However, the team found that the optical light and X-ray properties of OGLE-mNOVA-11 did not really match those of "classical" novas or Type Ia supernovas created by the thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf when stellar material is dumped on its surface from a companion star. They also differed from the characteristics of "dwarf novas," which occur in similar circumstances but are fainter and less destructive and can thus repeat.

"We think that millinovae are binary star systems composed of a white dwarf and a subgiant star, a star that has exhausted the hydrogen in its core and expanded," Mróz said. "The two stars orbit each other with a period of just a few days. Their proximity allows material to flow from the subgiant to the white dwarf."

The University of Warsaw researcher added that, while it is currently unclear how the X-ray emissions of millinovas are generated, he and the team have two initial ideas to work with.

"According to one hypothesis, the X-rays might be produced in a belt around the white dwarf's equator, where the gas from the subgiant hits the white dwarf surface," Mróz explained. "Alternatively, the X-rays may be coming from a weak thermonuclear runaway on the white dwarf surface that is triggered by the matter falling onto the white dwarf.

"The explosion is weak enough that little or no matter is ejected from the white dwarf."

If that's the case, the white dwarf should be growing in mass, which could mean that it eventually erupts in a more powerful Type Ia supernova. Thus, millinovas could be Type Ia "progenitors" — an exciting development if true.

Type Ia supernovas are incredibly useful to astronomers because their uniform light output allows them to be used as "standard candles" for determining cosmic distances. Getting a tip-off as to when and where a Type Ia supernova is about to blow via a millinova would help understand these events better.

Mróz explained what's next for the investigation of millinovas.

"We will monitor the brightness of all 29 objects in real-time and wait for the next outburst to start," he concluded. "We also plan to carry out more follow-up observations better to understand the physical processes responsible for these outbursts."

The team's research was published on Dec. 12 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

SpaceX launched 21 Starlink internet satellites from Florida's Space Coast early Monday morning (Dec. 23) and landed the returning rocket on a ship at sea.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Starlink spacecraft — 13 of which can beam service directly to cellphones — lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida today at 12:35 a.m. EDT (0535 GMT).

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth as planned, touching down in the Atlantic Ocean about eight minutes after launch on the SpaceX droneship "Just Read the Instructions."

It was the 15th liftoff and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description. Eight of those flights have been Starlink missions.

The Falcon 9's upper stage continued hauling the 21 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit, where they will be deployed about 65 minutes after launch.

Related: Starlink satellite train: how to see and track it in the night sky

Monday morning's Starlink launch was the 129th Falcon 9 mission of 2024. About two-thirds of those flights have been devoted to building out the Starlink broadband megaconstellation, which current consists of more than 6,800 active satellites.

The NASA spacecraft, called the Parker Solar Probe, is on course for what will be a record-setting close flyby of the sun on Christmas Eve, when it will fly through the star's outer atmosphere at 6:53 a.m. EST (1153 GMT) and pass within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the star's surface The flyby is the final trial for the Parker Solar Probe, which has made a series of ever-closer swings by the star (and seven flybys of Venus) on its mission to understand the sun like never before.

"No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory," said Nick Pinkine, Parker Solar Probe mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) in Maryland, in a statement. "We're excited to hear back from the spacecraft when it swings back around the sun."

What time will NASA's Parker Solar Probe fly through the sun?

As mentioned above, the Parker Solar Probe's closest sun flyby will occur on Tuesday, Dec. 24, at 6:53 a.m. EST (1153 GMT). At that exact time, the spacecraft will be at its closest point it will ever be to the sun: 3.8 million miles.

The Christmas Eve flyby will mark Parker's 22nd close encounter with the sun since its launch in 2018 (the first time it "touched the sun" was in 2021). The spacecraft will be flying at about 430,000 mph (692,000 kph), a mind-blowing speed which it reached by accelerating up via gravity assists from its seven Venus flybys, most recently in November.

During the Dec. 24 sun flyby, the Parker Solar Probe will fly through the sun's corona, its super-hot outer atmosphere, to study exactly why the region is so hot and other solar phenomena. The spacecraft has already set a new record as the closest human-built object to fly so close to the sun, and is flying seven times closer to the star than any other spacecraft.

Can I watch the Parker Solar Probe sun flyby online?

No, you will not be able to watch the Parker Solar Probe's sun flyby live online.

Unlike NASA rocket launches and Mars landings, the sun flyby will not be webcast or livestreamed in real time. Instead, NASA and the Parker Solar Probe mission team are providing updates on the spacecraft's status online in several places.

You can follow NASA's Parker Solar Probe mission blog (the agency's mission website is also a good place for details) or find updates at the JHUAPL Parker Solar Probe site. You can also find updates on NASA's @NASASun X page.

While you can't watch the Parker Solar Probe's flyby live, you can track the spacecraft's progress online. NASA's Eyes On The Solar System Parker Solar Probe page allows users to follow the spacecraft and see where it is any any given time.

JHUAPL also has a great walkthrough of the Parker Solar Probe sun flyby called "A Star Explored," that serves as a great guide to the flyby and mission.

How hot will Parker Solar Probe get during its sun flyby?

Christmas Eve may be a good time to roast chestnuts on the fire (or maybe toast marshmallows), but Parker Solar Probe scientists have built their spacecraft to avoid getting burned by the sun.

During its Dec. 24 flyby, the Parker Solar Probe is expected to experience temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius) as it swings by the sun. But the spacecraft can take the heat.

The Parker Solar Probe's spacecraft components and science instruments are protected by heat shield that is 8 feet wide (2.4 meters) and 4.5 inches (11 centimeters) thick. The shield, made of a type of carbon foam, is positioned on the sun-facing side of the spacecraft and is designed to withstand temperatures of up to 2,500 F (1,377 C).

"One yard behind that, where the body of the spacecraft resides, it is almost room temperature," JHUAPL mission officials wrote in an overview. "And all its systems will need to work perfectly for Parker to gather data from this dynamic environment near a star where no spacecraft has dared travel."

And in case you're wondering about the max temperature fo the sun, our guide on how hot is the sun is can answer those questions.

How long is Parker Solar Probe's sun flyby?

This Christmas Eve sun flyby is pretty fast. (What else would you expect from a spacecraft traveling at 430,000 mph?) But for the Parker Solar Probe mission team, the actual encounter will last over a week.

"This is one example of NASA's bold missions, doing something that no one else has ever done before to answer longstanding questions about our universe," said Arik Posner, Parker Solar Probe program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in the Dec. 20 statement. "We can't wait to receive that first status update from the spacecraft and start receiving the science data in the coming weeks."

Here's a rundown of when to expect updates from the Parker Solar Probe.

Friday, Dec. 20

For Parker's mission controllers, the encounter began in earnest on Friday, Dec. 20. That's when the Parker Solar Probe sent its final signal to Earth indicating it was beginning the flyby.

"Mission operators at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, received a beacon transmission from Parker, through NASA’s Deep Space Network complex in Canberra, Australia, at 7:20 p.m. EST today indicating all spacecraft systems were operating normally," NASA wrote in a update on Dec. 20.

That's the last NASA and JHUAPL scientists will hear from the Parker Solar Probe until after the flyby, Space.com has learned.

Tuesday, Dec. 24

This is Parker Solar Flyby day. The mission team will be out of contact with the spacecraft, but it should be executing its programmed actions to perform the flyby.

At the time of the flyby, be on the lookout for a potential video or statement release from NASA and JHUAPL mission team members to mark the event.

Friday, Dec. 27

Only on Friday, Dec. 27, do NASA and JHUAPL mission controllers expect to hear their first signal from the Parker Solar Probe after its flyby.

Don't expect much, like new photos or sun videos. This check in from the Parker Solar Probe is expected at midnight and will be a beacon only to indicate the spacecraft made it through the flyby and include some status on its "general health."

Thursday, Jan. 1, 2025

Happy New Year! To ring in 2025, the Parker Solar Probe is expected to send its first telemetry and "housekeeping" data back to its mission operations center at JHUAPL.

The timing of this tag up from Parker is fluid as it will depend on where the probe is in its path around the sun, JHUAPL officials told Space.com. However, the contact here will again be a health checkup for Parker, allowing its mission team to check the spacecraft's systems and instrument health, as well as if its data recorders are full from the flyby.

The first science data downloads from Parker (like images or other observations) are not expected until late January, according to JHUAPL.

What happens after the Parker Solar Probe's sun flyby?

The Christmas Eve solar flyby of the Parker Solar Probe may be its closest sun flyby of its mission, but it won't be the last.

In all, the $1.5 billion Parker Solar Probe mission is designed to make at least 24 close flybys of the sun. This Dec. 24 flyby is No. 22. After this encounter, the spacecraft is expected top make at least two more sun flybys before its seven-year primary mission ends in 2025.

The next sun flyby by Parker will be on March 22, 2025. The final scheduled flyby, called "Perihelion 24," will be on June 19, 2025. Both of those future flybys are expected to approach the sun from a similar distance as the Dec. 24 event.

"The spacecraft will remain in this orbit for the remainder of its primary mission, completing two more perihelia at about the same distance and speed — a record 430,000 miles (692,018 kilometers) per hour — in March and June 2025," JUAPL officials wrote in November after the final Venus flyby. "After that, the team will decide whether to keep the spacecraft in that orbit or reposition it."

Astronauts, scientists and explorers gathered aboard an Antarctica-bound ship on Friday for a panel discussion aimed at inspiring young people’s curiosity about the ocean, outer space and their own backyards.

Students in 46 countries were set to tune in to the conversation's live stream, according to Future of Space, the Antarctica expedition organizer. Daniel Fox, co-founder of Future of Space, said it was the first-ever live broadcast from the Drake Passage, the notoriously turbulent stretch of ocean between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula.

The speakers — astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, "Star Trek" actor William Shatner, filmmaker Céline Cousteau and astronauts Scott Kelly and José Hernández — shared stories of their own early interests in exploration and answered questions sent in from students around the world. The panel was moderated by Janet Ivey, host of the children’s television show "Janet's Planet" on PBS.

Tyson, perhaps the world’s best-known science communicator, said in response to a question from a 15-year-old in Finland that he first realized his knack for explaining complex concepts in eighth grade math class. When students didn’t understand the teacher’s description of a matrix, Tyson tried explaining it in his own way. For the other students, he said, it clicked.

"What I realized is, if I'm ever tasked with explaining something, the job of the person understanding it is on me," he said. "It's not their responsibility to know what I’m saying. It’s my responsibility to have them understand."

He said that commitment to understanding remains the driving force behind the prolific career he has built as a communicator.

“I would rather just stay home in the lab, but I feel a sense of duty to bring the universe down to Earth for all those who are curious, because I can,” Tyson said. “And if I didn’t, it would be disrespect for those who did it for me when I was coming up in the ranks.”

Cousteau highlighted a moment when she encountered a humpback whale while diving off the coast of Hawaii.

"I felt incredibly small, and that sense of feeling incredibly small I wish upon all of you because it really puts you in perspective of what we are," she said.

But she also emphasized that exploring doesn't require going deep in the ocean or out to space. "We don’t need to go far away," she said, adding that curiosity can happen anywhere.

At times, the conversation turned into a lighthearted debate over whether it was more difficult to get to the bottom of the ocean or into space.

And while the focus was primarily on the awe of pushing new frontiers in the name of curiosity, Kelly also explained some of the physical challenges he faced during and after his space missions — rashes, loss of blood volume, legs that would "swell up like water balloons."

"You're not being a good ambassador for people to go into space," Tyson teased him at one point.

A second conversation that afternoon, featuring most of the same speakers and moderated by journalist Ann Curry, focused more on the science, but also practical constraints, behind advances in space travel and the possibility of humans one day colonizing another planet or moon.

"Antarctica is warmer, balmier and wetter than any place on Mars, yet no one’s lining up to build condominiums here,” Tyson said. "To dream is one thing, but at the end of the day somebody’s gotta write the check to make it happen. The people who write the checks have different motivations from those who do the dreaming, and rarely do they align."

Kelly said his brother, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and another former astronaut, often said getting humans to Mars is "not about rocket science, it’s about political science." Funding and interest from politicians are bigger obstacles than engineering, he said.

"However bad we make this planet, it's always going to be easier to live here than on Mars," Kelly said. "But I still do believe we should go to Mars, and I think we will someday."

Asked by a student from Iran about advice for becoming the first person to travel "to Mars and beyond," Shatner encouraged young people to use the idea of space travel to inspire them to focus on their education.

Kelly agreed, explaining that he struggled to find motivation in school before he read "The Right Stuff," the 1979 book by Tom Wolfe that chronicles postwar development of rocket-powered aircraft.

And Hernández, who applied to become an astronaut 11 times before NASA selected him, reminded students to stay persistent and optimistic in the face of daunting challenges.

"I always tell folks that it’s okay to dream big," he said. "I encourage folks to dream big. But you need to back it up with hard work and preparation."

This article was provided by Space2Sea Antarctica and FUTURE of SPACE. For more information on the expedition and FoS visit the Space2Sea Antarctica expedition site, and the FUTURE of SPACE initiative.

Aiming for a worldwide release on Feb. 28, 2025, "The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie" has had a circuitous and oft-delayed path to the big screen after being abandoned by incoming Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav as a direct-to-streaming feature, before eventually getting a theatrical presentation courtesy of the most unlikely indie distribution partner.

Now check out the first hilarious trailer which arrived as the movie headed for an Oscar-qualifying engagement on Dec. 13, ahead of its global unwrapping next year.

This hand-drawn feature represents the first fully-animated movie in Looney Tunes' long 80-year history and it originally debuted at France's Annecy International Animation Film Festival this past June. But it was a seriously bumpy ride for the imaginative sci-fi project that began in 2021 as an animated film for Warner Bros.' Max streaming service directed by Peter Browngardt. "At least three, four times during the production I was waiting for that phone call [to shut down the movie," Browngardt told THR. "It was a rocky journey."

A stampede of no less than 15 screenwriters and story consultants have their names on the far-out cartoon tale, which focuses on Porky Pig and Daffy Duck stumbling onto a diabolical alien plot to conquer the Earth using wads of mind-control bubblegum and their attempts to rescue our planet from these candy-crazed extraterrestrials.

When Warner Bros. completed their merger with Discovery in 2022, "The Day The Earth Blew Up" was on the budgetary chopping block targeted for tax write-downs just like "Batgirl" and "Coyote vs Acme." Following its successful screening at Annecy, the indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment stepped up and grabbed domestic distribution honors. Its talented vocal cast includes Eric Bauza, Candi Milo, Peter MacNicol, Wayne Knight, Fred Tatasciore, and Laraine Newman.

"'The Day the Earth Blew Up' is a historical moment for the Looney Tunes franchise, and we are proud to be partnering with Warner Bros. Animation to bring this film to audiences theatrically. We cannot wait for audiences of all ages to experience one of the smartest animated films in recent years," Gareth West, CEO of Ketchup Entertainment, told Deadline.

Nick Cross acts as the animated feature's Art Director with Aaron Spurgeon as Production Designer. Warner Bros. Animation's Sam Register and Pete Browngardt serve as Executive Producers.

"The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie" lands on Feb. 28, 2025.

"I started thinking, could you recreate the DSKY at the scale of an Apple Watch?" said Mark Clayton, Apollo Instruments' CEO. An engineer with a lifelong passion for aviation and space, Clayton was working on miniaturized digital displays when he noticed that the vibrant green glow they emitted bore a striking resemblance to the iconic DSKY display.

Using original drawings from MIT, Clayton and his team, which includes two former Formula 1 engineers, set about scaling down the DSKY.

"We were pushing our manufacturing equipment to its limits, producing something so intricate and small," he said.

Related: The Apollo Program: How NASA sent astronauts to the moon

Nouns and verbs

Equally revolutionary as the AGC's small size was the way the Apollo astronauts interacted with it. Rather than carrying thousands of punch cards into space or relying on a sprawling bank of switches and lights, as was typical for computers of the time, MIT designed one of the first display and keyboard systems, which was then used to enter numbers representing verb and noun codes.

To those accustomed to modern point-and-click setups, the AGC's approach can appear challenging to grasp. In essence, verbs represented actions the computer could perform, while nouns were specific data inputs.

For example, pressing "verb" followed by "35" triggered a test of the indicator lights and display. Verb and noun commands also instructed the Apollo lunar module's computer to begin the landing routine. Both of these actions can be replicated on the DSKY Moonwatch.

Verb and noun codes also allow users to adjust the watch's time, alarm, stopwatch and GPS navigation functionalities. On the Apollo missions, astronauts used a "cheat sheet" to keep track of nearly 200 verbs and nouns. Wearers have a similar guide, so there is no long list of codes to memorize.

"We felt a profound responsibility to get this right," said Clayton. "We wanted to create something that the community is going to be accepting of, where they say, 'This is exactly how we would have designed it ourselves.'"

Code pre-loaded

Half a decade in the making, Apollo Instruments' DSKY Moonwatch is designed to replicate the DSKY aboard the Apollo 11 lunar module at a 4:6:1 scale, featuring identical fonts and color backlighting. The commitment to authenticity extended to matching the original number of bulbs (three) behind each indicator light.

The LED lights inside the watch normally emit a pure-white light, lacking the warm glow of the DSKY's original incandescent bulbs. To replicate the precise hue, the team enlisted Rosco, a multi-Academy Award-winning company, to design custom color filters. "Creating the [DSKY] Moonwatch posed major challenges," said Clayton. "But we wanted users to experience it just as Apollo astronauts did with the original."

The watch's open-source core code was written to be user-friendly and open up wide-ranging possibilities for programmers. This includes porting the original Luminary code, designed by Apollo software lead Margaret Hamilton and her team at MIT, onto the watch. Enthusiasts can connect the DSKY Moonwatch to a spaceflight simulator on their computer and recreate the Apollo 11 mission, punching in the same commands as used by Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin.

Containing 40,000 lines of code, Luminary was the software for the Apollo lunar module. During Apollo 11's landing, error messages started flashing as bad radar data overloaded the system.

Because the lunar module used one of the first fly-by-wire systems, Armstong's joystick inputs did not directly control the spacecraft; instead, they were processed by the computer first, making the situation potentially mission-ending. However, the Luminary code was designed to prioritize essential tasks, allowing the Apollo computer to dump the bad data and ensure a successful landing.

Beyond the moon

Museum docents and history buffs often like to cite that the modern smartphone has more computing power than all of NASA had in 1969, or that a smart doorbell has the same computing power as the Apollo spacecraft. But this overlooks the true power of the Apollo Guidance Computer. While it doesn't match modern devices in raw processing power, it was remarkably reliable and capable for the mission it was designed to accomplish.

Porting the Luminary code onto the DSKY Moonwatch is just one of the ways Clayton envisions people interacting with the watch. "You can upload your own custom code onto it," he said. "It can be used as a tool for a maths or physics project. The possibilities are limited only by the user's imagination."

Future innovations to the watch will be community-led. "We're considering a miniaturized Apollo Guidance Computer with a customized circuit board to connect with the Moonwatch, but we want the community to guide our next steps," Clayton said.

Related: Lunar legacy: 45 Apollo moon mission photos

The Apollo Guidance Computer and DSKY were groundbreaking developments in both space exploration and computing; without them, the moon landings wouldn't have been possible. For Clayton and his team, the goal with the DSKY Moonwatch was to create a "jewel of miniaturization:" a replica you could wear on your wrist that captured the Apollo astronaut experience while enabling new uses for the legacy design.

Apollo Instruments' DSKY Moonwatch is available for pre-order now with a down payment of £240 (about $300 U.S.) against the total cost of £649 ($820 U.S.).

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on X at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2024 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

This prestigious pair of Disney+ Original "Star Wars" shows is presented as part of the Lucasfilm Collector's Editions series and comes supercharged with 4K Ultra HD Dolby Vision and Atmos audio. These two snazzy Collector's Editions arrive in glossy SteelBook cases emblazoned with fresh artwork courtesy of illustrator Attila Szarka, and are packed with bonus features, interviews, deleted scenes, and collector cards.

To celebrate the season and stir up sugarplums dancing in your heads, we've got a dynamic duo of featurette clips to share. The first chronicles how "The Clone Wars'" Anakin Skywalker transitioned from animated form to the live-action "Ahsoka" show.

Ahsoka - "Anakin"

This was the first time Ahsoka visited the mysterious netherworld known as The World Between Worlds, a mystical realm of the Force that was utilized and explored in "The Clone Wars" series. Inside, the past and the present merge for her former master to provide Ahsoka with some sage advice and the necessary skills to pass on her knowledge to her own apprentice, Sabine Wren.

Our second clip comes from "The Mandalorian" season 3, offering an illuminating mini-documentary on how the VFX wizards and makeup artists of "The Mandalorian" crafted its wild menagerie of season 3 aliens and androids.

The Mandalorian - "Creatures"

Here, Peter Clarke and Rick Galinson of the Academy Award-nominated, Emmy-winning Legacy Effects discuss the practical animatronic marvels of the "topiary-headed pirate king," Gorian Shard. "I've made things with hair, I've made things with skin, but I've never made anything that was covered with plants," Clarke says. "It's got animatronic tentacles that activate and animate on their own, and then full animatronic features. It ended up being a pretty cool character."

Blast into the bonus details for "Star Wars: The Mandalorian" — The Complete Third Season:

"Honoring the Magistrate: A Tribute to Carl Weathers" — Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni pay tribute to Carl Weathers, the unforgettable talent behind Greef Karga.

"Galactic Legacy: The Creatures and Droids of The Mandalorian" — Discover the secrets of Season 3's memorable creatures and droids with the artists who bring them to life.

"Forging the Covert: Part Three" — Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni and the filmmakers explore the expanding world of Season Three's Mandalorian warriors.

And check out the extras with "Star Wars: Ahsoka" — The Complete First Season:

"Ahsoka: Legacy" — Join cast and crew for a look at developing Ahsoka's live-action series.

"Path of the Apprentice" — Explore the dynamic of Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka within the world between worlds.

"Ghosts of the Past" — Go deep with a spotlight on Ahsoka's allies: Sabine, Hera, Ezra and Chopper.

"Darkness Rising" — Uncover the secrets of Ahsoka's foes

For one, the odd objects have sparked a visual public mayday and melee — one that might be mirroring elements of the ongoing unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) issue, spurring talk of secretive saucer crashes by run-amok alien crewmembers with expired driver licenses.

Mischaracterization of what's seen. Public anxiety about what's not known. Government officials seemingly not clear on what's happening. Toss in Capitol Hill lawmakers demanding answers about what to do next. It's all enough to give you a case of the high- and low-altitude heebie-jeebies.

People don't usually look up

Jamey Jacob, executive director of the Oklahoma Aerospace Institute for Research and Education at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, has some thoughts about what's likely going on.

Related: UFOs and UAP: History, sightings and mysteries

"This is a case of the general populace not being familiar with the density of air traffic in the national airspace, particularly on the Eastern Seaboard," Jacob told Space.com. "Most people today generally don't spend much time looking up at the night sky, and when you do, you finally start to see what's around you."

Jacob said that, while the possibility of drone threats is something that we should be concerned about — particularly since we're largely unprepared to deal with it — the present scenario appears to be mostly misidentification of piloted aircraft.

The drones that have been sighted, Jacob added, look to be generally operating under the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's night authorization for drone pilots.

"Nefarious operations would as a rule of thumb not fly with navigation lights so [as] to be harder to track," said Jacob. "The misidentification of commercial airliners and private aircraft as drones are predominantly due to the difficulty of determining size and distance of a vehicle without a reference scale. Research that we have done on estimating size and location of both drones and manned aircraft back this up."

Does the government know more?

Others have different ideas, however. For example, the drone sightings are real and they are government- and/or industry-operated drones, said Robert Powell, an executive board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies in Austin.

"There are too many, and they are too large for them to be civilian," Powell told Space.com. "I don't think any adversary of the United States would dare try to fly drones into our territory at this level, and if they did, I would think we would respond."

Powell added that that he feels confident that government officials know much more about the drones than they are telling the public.

"This of course leads to the same type of problems as with the UAP issue. Anxiety kicks in and people see drones everywhere they look," said Powell.

Moreover, the media is not capable of distinguishing between reports of drones versus reports of normal aircraft, nor are they adept at asking the right questions of government officials, Powell said.

Kernel of truth

"Conspiracy theories start to grow because the government withholds information and makes nonsensical statements, such as 'We don't know where the drones come from or what they are, but we know they pose no risk,'" Powell said.

Some members of the public are indeed seeing drones, Powell said. "Amazingly, the same debunkers that argue against UAP are arguing against drones. They cite examples of misidentification, which of course exists."

Bottom line from Powell: "There is a kernel of truth in these drone reports, and I think the government knows the truth. I hope people will understand that as long as the government withholds information that this is the type of mess that unfolds."

Standard practice

"Many of these fly like human-made drones and others appear to be airplanes or helicopters," said Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb.

"It is standard practice for the U.S. military to notify law enforcement authorities of any plans to fly drones over residential areas," he told Space.com. "Therefore, unidentified drones must have originated from civilians or an adversarial nation."

Loeb is a co-founder of the Galileo Project initiative. Its goal is to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and systematic scientific research.

Inappropriate smoke screen?

As for drones from adversarial nations, Loeb said that possibility should come as no surprise, since a Chinese spy balloon was spotted back in early 2023 flying at a high altitude across the United States.

Even though the balloon was nearly 150 feet (45 meters) in diameter, Loeb recalled, it took a while for the U.S. Air Force to shoot it down off the coast of South Carolina.

Drones are used routinely in the current conflict in Ukraine, which began with the Russian invasion in February 2022. And drone technology has advanced considerably in recent years, especially in China, Loeb said.

"The primary question that needs to be clarified is whether these flying objects are used for espionage or pose any other national security threat," Loeb said. "Alluding to an extraterrestrial origin is an inappropriate smoke screen to hide the incompetence of the U.S. intelligence agencies."

On Episode 141 of This Week In Space, are joined by producer Anthony and our old pal Ant Pruitt to celebrate and discuss a wide variety of topics, from first space memories to our favorite space toys to what spaceflight means to each of us.

It's a warm "family reunion" you won't want to miss! Join us for some holiday cheer, and Tariq's "Tiny Tim" moment...

Download or subscribe to this show at: https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space.

Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Space news of the week

• Parker Solar Probe flyby on Christmas Eve
• Christmas in Space
• Potential Gov't shutdown and space
• Ant Pruitt on Patreon

Model Falcon 9!

Finally, did you know you can launch your own SpaceX rocket? Model rocket maker Estes' stunning scale model of a Falcon 9 rocket that you can pick up now. The launchable model is a detailed recreation of the Falcon 9 and retails for $149.99. You can save 10% by using the code IN-COLLECTSPACE at checkout, courtesy of our partners collectSPACE.com.

About This Week In Space

This Week in Space covers the new space age. Every Friday we take a deep dive into a fascinating topic. What's happening with the new race to the moon and other planets? When will SpaceX really send people to Mars?

Join Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik from Space.com as they tackle those questions and more each week on Friday afternoons. You can subscribe today on your favorite podcatcher.

This doesn't mean Star Wars' TV efforts are winding down anytime soon. Skeleton Crew just dropped and we're eagerly awaiting Andor season 2, Ahsoka season 2, and the recently-announced Star Wars: Visions' Volume 3. But now we're finally getting some movies to bulk out the Star Wars timeline too.

Other Star Wars movie projects are rumored to be in development, but we're sticking to the officially announced ones here. Heck, there's a chance some of these movies won't even see the light of day, but they are all officially on the books for now.

The Star Wars universe is also expanding across video games and written works. There are plenty of upcoming Star Wars games worth being excited about, but maybe you ought to check out the best Star Wars games of all time first.

The Mandalorian & Grogu

• Release date: May 22, 2026
• Director: Jon Favreau

Possible deepfaked Luke Skywalker cameo aside, the next Star Wars movie won't deal with Jedi or Sith. After The Mandalorian's season 3 finale wrapped up all the major story arcs from the two previous seasons, rumors swirled that Din Djarin and Grogu were jumping to cinemas next instead of getting a fourth season. As it turns out, those rumors were right, with Jon Favreau making his return to the big screen to direct The Mandalorian & Grogu.

Little is known about the plot at this point (unless you can find that leaked in-progress first look), but we know Din Djarin is essentially working for the New Republic now, after he and Bo-Katan Kryze took down Moff Gideon and reclaimed Mandalore. His next adventure will see him tracking down dangerous Imperial war criminals, likely tying into the post-Ahsoka season 1 scenario which saw Grand Admiral Thrawn returning to the known galaxy alongside ancient Nightsisters. Dave Filoni's event movie will focus on that conflict and wrap up the New Republic-era storytelling efforts, so we're expecting The Mandalorian & Grogu to be lighter in galaxy-wide stakes and tone.

Dave Filoni’s New Republic-era movie

• Release date: Unknown
• Director: Dave Filoni

Animation veteran turned Star Wars maestro Dave Filoni, now also Executive VP and Chief Creative Officer at Lucasfilm, has been directly involved in the development of all the Mandalorian-adjacent Star Wars shows. Currently, he's writing and preparing to shoot Ahsoka's second season after cracking The Mandalorian & Grogu's script alongside Jon Favreau, but those roads lead to an even larger big-screen project.

The announcement came during Star Wars Celebration 2023, where three new movies were unveiled by Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy. Ahsoka is perhaps the central piece to these plans, as it reintroduced Grand Admiral Thrawn as the main threat of this era and brought several Star Wars Rebels characters into live-action. If we couple those heroes and villains with The Mandalorian's biggest players (and perhaps even some legacy faces), a pretty explosive and fanservice-y Star Wars movie could be coming our way.

Rey Skywalker-centric sequel movie

• Release date: Unknown
• Director: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

All fingers are pointing to Daisy Ridley's Rey Skywalker being the key to Star Wars' on-screen future, at least when it comes to the actual post-Rise of Skywalker future. Despite the mixed reception of the sequel trilogy, we can all agree that Ridley's Rey Skywalker deserves to grow beyond the confines of the Skywalker Saga as she tries to rebuild the Jedi Order once again. We could even see John Boyega's much-deserved return.

This was another movie announced during 2023's Star Wars Celebration, with Oscar-winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy attached to direct. On top of other rumored scribes, Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight had been working on a draft for the script but departed the project earlier this year. Between that and the toxicity surrounding the sequel movies, Disney may have since gotten cold feet about the project but, for now, it's still officially in the works.

Simon Kinberg’s new trilogy

• Release date: Unknown
• Director: Unknown

One of 2024's biggest Hollywood surprises was to hear that Lucasfilm, on top of all its standalone movies in development, was moving ahead with plans for a new Star Wars trilogy. The architect? Rebels co-creator, writer, and producer Simon Kinberg. He's a prolific writer, though many of his writing and producing efforts elsewhere have been hit-and-miss. The Martian was a clear winner, but he also has Fox's recent X-Men movies to answer for, including the dreadful Dark Phoenix adaptation which he also directed.

On the bright side, giving one writer control of a trilogy of movies should help give it a cohesive story arc, so it looks like Disney has learned some lessons from the sequel trilogy. Kinberg could even serve as director, on top of writing and producing, for one or more of these movies. Details are murky on whether the Rey Skywalker movie we mentioned earlier will be the start of this trilogy, or its own project. We'll just have to wait and see.

Shawn Levy’s mystery movie

• Release date: Unknown
• Director: Shawn Levy

Shawn Levy recently landed the biggest win of his prolific career with Deadpool & Wolverine, so it makes sense that Lucasfilm would be courting him for the galaxy far, far away. Right now, he's got plenty of projects lined up, but a script for his Star Wars movie is already in the works with longtime collaborator Jonathan Tropper attached. Unsurprisingly, the director's lips are sealed when it comes to sharing even the tiniest bit about his pitch, but he's fully committed to the project while being aware that many others have failed to get their movies to the big screen.

Rumors about his movie involving Rey Skywalker in some capacity have been floating around for a while, with recent reports from the trades giving them some credibility, but the truth is we don't really know what he and Tropper are cooking. For all we know, the powers that be at Lucasfilm could be developing several post-sequel-trilogy projects in parallel to see which ones hold the most promise — throwing big doo-doo at the wall to see what sticks, if you will.

James Mangold’s ‘Jedi origins’ movie

• Release date: Unknown
• Director: James Mangold

It's safe to say that the fifth Indiana Jones movie was divisive, but Disney and Lucasfilm clearly enjoyed working with James Mangold on the project as he’s been given the keys to Star Wars to work on a prequel. His movie, also announced during Celebration 2023, has been described as a “biblical epic” by the filmmaker himself. How far back are we going? Roughly 25,000 years if the plans don’t change. That is a lot, yes, even before the Old Republic days.

The pitch is simple: “Where did the Force come from, when did we discover it, when did we learn how to use it?” Sure, Dark Horse Comics’ Dawn of the Jedi series already explored such ideas, but the current canon’s past is a blank slate, so expect all-new concepts to be brought to the table.

This project sounds like the most daring one that’s currently in the works, while also being the most likely to enter production soon. It looks like recruiting veteran Andor scribe Beau Willimon to co-write the fresh script was a move in the right direction.

Donald Glover's Lando movie

• Release date: Unknown
• Director: Unknown

Originally announced as a limited series for Disney Plus with Dear White People’s Justin Simien attached, this spinoff project went silent for a while, then returned to life when it was revealed that young Lando Calrissian actor Donald Glover and his brother Stephen were reworking it as a movie.

More than one year later, all signs point to the project still being alive, just not a priority one for Lucasfilm at the moment. Donald Glover is a very busy artist. It’s likely to be on the lighter side of Star Wars, and we’re excited to see where it goes, but it faces a daunting question; What stories are there left to tell for Lando?

Taika Waititi's movie

• Release date: Unknown
• Director: Taika Waititi

There was a time when Taika Waititi was Hollywood's hottest director. After Thor: Ragnarok, one of the best Marvel movies of all time, the filmmaker was swarmed with offers to direct huge blockbusters. Beyond the divisive fourth Thor entry, he's been focusing on smaller projects and helping develop many TV shows. His next movie, Klara and the Sun, is now in post-production, but what's next for him? Well, we're wondering about that Star Wars movie of his that was announced in 2020.

Waititi delivered a fantastic piece of Star Wars in The Mandalorian's season 1 finale (and also played assassin droid IG-11), yet many cinephiles and Star Wars fans have started to wonder whether he's the right pick to craft an entire movie after his last two flicks felt so-so at best. While it's still in development according to THR's recent report and Waititi commented in 2023 that he'd "really like to get right," we think this is one of the few that might slip into development hell, especially as we've heard nothing about potential plot details or even the setting.

Rogue Squadron

• Release date: Unknown
• Director: Patty Jenkins

Patty Jenkins is another filmmaker that seemed to be everywhere a few years ago, but has since hit a few bumps in the road. In late 2020, Disney and Lucasfilm were very committed to getting Star Wars back to cinemas by December 2023, and those plans even included a behind-the-scenes teaser for a Rogue Squadron movie that still hasn't happened.

It could be dead in the water, but both THR and other sources have recently stated the studio still wants to make it, even if it's been moved to the back burner. As for the era, rumors pointed to it being a post-episode IX story instead of yet another tale set during the reign of the Empire.

Earlier this year, Jenkins confirmed she was back actively working on Rogue Squadron after shifting her attention towards Wonder Woman 3 and Cleopatra, two projects which have since gone silent (though Cleopatra might still get made with someone else). She's stated in the past she "always wanted to make a fighter pilot movie," and after Top Gun: Maverick's massive success in 2022, Disney and Lucasfilm would be silly not to continue to iterate on a script until the movie is ready to go, whether it's with Jenkins or another lead.

Rian Johnson's trilogy

• Release date: Unknown
• Director: Rian Johnson

Ahead of The Last Jedi's release in December 2017, Lucasfilm announced that Rian Johnson would put together an entirely new trilogy after the second installment of the sequels. We all know what happened among fans later, but the reality is that The Last Jedi was (and still is) celebrated by most critics and earned over $1.3 billion worldwide with its theatrical release alone.

Even many of those who profoundly hated The Last Jedi as the eighth episode of the Skywalker Saga have to admit that Johnson could come up with a pretty interesting story that isn't beholden to a pre-existing series, while those who celebrated the movie continue to feel that nothing made under Disney has quite matched those creative swings (besides maybe Andor). While Kathleen Kennedy admitted in 2023 that the trilogy was indefinitely on hold due to the writer-director's Knives Out commitments, it seems that all parties involved still want to get together again... at some point.

As the official start of the astronomical winter, the sun reaches its most southerly point in the sky as seen from Earth. At noon, it appears directly overhead at the Tropic of Capricorn, located at a latitude of 23.5 degrees south. This position correlates to the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, which is tilted as far away from the sun as possible and, in turn, experiences the fewest hours of sunlight.

The exact timing of the Winter Solstice, which lasts only a moment, and official changing of seasons occurred on Saturday (Dec. 21) at 4:20 a.m. EST (0920 GMT), according to In the Sky.org.

With winter comes the coldest months of the year. This is because the sun remains much closer to the horizon than in warmer months. Appearing lower in the sky throughout the day, sunlight is less intense and spread over a larger area, lending to the cooler temperatures experienced during winter. The good news is that from here on out, each day will gradually grow longer and sunnier as the sun rises earlier and sets later until the summer solstice in June.

Earth experiences seasons because the planet is tilted on an axis by 23.5 degrees. This means that each year, as Earth orbits the sun, there are periods when the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the sun and receives more sunlight, resulting in summer, and times when the Southern Hemisphere tilts toward the sun, receiving more sunlight, which marks our winter.

Therefore, cooler temperatures experienced during winter are a result of Earth’s tilt rather than the planet's distance from the sun. In fact, Earth will reach its closest point to the sun, also known as perihelion, during winter in the Northern Hemisphere on Jan. 4, 2025, according to In the Sky.org.

Perihelion occurs because the Earth’s path around the sun is not a perfect circle, but rather an ellipse, whereby the distance between the planet and the sun changes during the year. At perihelion, Earth is about 91.4 million miles (147.1 million kilometers) away from the sun, compared to its average distance of about 93 million miles (149.6 million km).

Many festivals and traditions are rooted in celebration of the Winter Solstice, which is viewed by many cultures as a time of renewal, hope and the return of light. Starting tomorrow, daylight will gradually begin to increase. While this change will be subtle at first, it will become noticeable in about a month as the sun rises earlier and sets later.

The undershirts, made of a smart material known as Astroskin, have previously been tested on the International Space Station (ISS), but will require a redesign to make them fit for service in deep space, farther away from Earth.

Canadian company Hexoskin will design the wearable device as part of a contract announced by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) on Nov. 26.

"The Lunar Gateway will be about 1,000 times farther away from Earth than the International Space Station, so there will be a lot of constraints in terms of cargo [and] communication, but also the radiation environment aboard the station," Pierre-Alexandre Fournier, Hexoskin co-founder and CEO, told Space.com.

"Radiation is a big factor when you design electronics, and we have to make sure that the components we will be using can withstand that high level of radiation," Fournier added.

Related: Astronaut suits up in 'smart' astroskin jersey on space station

During ISS missions, astronauts absorb anywhere between 50 to 2,000 millisieverts of ionizing radiation, equivalent to 150 to 6,000 chest X-rays, according to NASA. During a mission on or around the moon, the exposure could be up to one order of magnitude higher, according to the European Space Agency.

"We will have to identify the requirements for the new space station, but we also want to use this as an opportunity to update the product," Fournier said. "To improve the capabilities, the processing power, things like that."

The Astroskin wearable health monitor is made of the stretchable material elastane and fitted with six sensors that continuously monitor the astronaut's heart rate, blood pressure, oxygenation, skin temperature, activity level and breathing rate. The data is transmitted in real time to a computer app where AI algorithms analyze it for unexpected patterns and changes. The technology was first tested on the ISS in 2019 by Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques and has been worn by astronauts ever since.

"The nice thing about having a shirt that covers the whole upper body is that you have access to all the surface around the torso where the vital signals can be measured," said Fournier. "It makes it very comfortable. You don't need to stick any adhesive sensors anywhere. Everybody is wearing clothes every day, so a smart garment is a very natural thing to use."

The CSA said in a statement that the new device will "fit into astronauts' daily routines during missions in the lunar environment" and "collect valuable data about how astronauts' bodies respond to the unique conditions of lunar orbit."

Fournier expects that the smart undershirt could make it to the Lunar Gateway at some point in 2028 or 2029, most likely with the first batch of astronauts to visit the new outpost as part of the Artemis 4 mission.

Lunar Gateway is expected to begin construction in 2027 when its first two modules — the Power and Propulsion Element and the Habitation and Logistics Outpost — will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

Hexaskin originally launched the product in 2009 with the aim to apply AI and data-driven approaches to preventative healthcare. They hoped the technology would help medical researchers studying chronic conditions such as cardiac and respiratory diseases.

"Our goal was to develop things for everyone that needs medical attention on Earth," said Fournier. "It's still our focus today."

The company won a contract to create a bio-monitoring device for astronauts in 2011 and has since tested it in various settings. In addition to astronauts on the space station, the Astroskin undershirt has been used in simulated Mars missions on Earth, in long-duration expeditions to Antarctica, and also to help other professionals in high-stress jobs such as first responders and pilots.

"The work we do in space is very valuable in terms of engineering," said Fournier. "It allows us to push the limits of what's possible in terms of product design, but then we take this technology and make it benefit all our other clients."

SpaceX launched 30 satellites to orbit early Saturday morning (Dec. 21).

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Saturday at 6:34 a.m. EDT (1134 GMT; 3:34 a.m. local California time), kicking off a rideshare mission SpaceX calls Bandwagon-2.

Thirty satellites went up on Bandwagon-2, including payloads for South Korea's Agency for Defense Development as well as "Arrow Science and Technology, Exolaunch, HawkEye 360, Maverick Space Systems, Sidus Space, Tomorrow Companies Inc., True Anomaly and Think Orbital," SpaceX wrote in a mission description.

Related: SpaceX: Facts about Elon Musk's private spaceflight company

SpaceX has launched one Bandwagon mission already — Bandwagon-1, which sent up 11 satellites this past April. The company also launches other rideshare missions with a series it calls "Transporter."

SpaceX has launched 11 Transporter missions to date. The first one, which flew in January 2021, lofted 143 satellites to orbit, a single-launch record that still stands.

As to plan on Saturday, the Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth about eight minutes after launch, landing vertically back at Vandenberg.

It was the 21st flight for this particular booster, according to the SpaceX mission description. That's just three away from the company's rocket-reuse record.

SpaceX did not give a timeline for the deployment of the 30 satellites.

The first indication I would have the opportunity to report from Antarctica came in the form of a frantic series of texts from a friend less than two months ago.

I had just stepped into a meeting when my phone buzzed, so I couldn’t read the messages right away. All I could make out from a quick glance was "Antarctica" and "GABE DO THIS."

An hour went by before I could figure out what was going on. "A trip to Antarctica seems too good to be true," I thought, trying to tame my expectations. But when I caught up on texts and emails, it turned out to be exactly that — one spot for a journalism student from my school to accompany legendary explorers and science communicators to Antarctica.

I study at American University in Washington, D.C., a city where students have unique access to powerful institutions and the experiential learning opportunities they offer. But this was different. This was a chance to see up close what science and exploration look like in one of Earth's most remote corners. I’m immensely grateful that AU's School of Communication saw value in my environmental reporting background and selected me to join this expedition.

Throughout my week in Antarctica I’ll be asking questions, writing, taking photos and regularly sharing what I learn with the outside world. I, along with an impressive team of filmmakers, researchers and explorers, will visit sites of great historic import such as Elephant Island, where Ernest Shackleton and his crew took refuge in the early 1900s, and of modern-day significance, like the Ukrainian Vernadsky research base. That visit is particularly significant because our ship will bring to the base two Ukrainian army veterans who have long hoped to travel there.

The goals of Future of Space, the expedition organizer, are lofty — "Embrace new frontiers, celebrate the human experience, and elevate the conversation."

Mine are more modest: to find stories that spark curiosity and make readers want to know more. If you learn something new, I've done my job.

This article was provided by Space2Sea Antarctica and FUTURE of SPACE. For more information on the expedition and FoS visit the Space2Sea Antarctica expedition site, and the FUTURE of SPACE initiative.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report this month that uses climate data to show where it's most likely there will be snow on the ground for Christmas Day.

The data consist of averages from the past three decades of different types of observations. This includes both the monthly and daily normals of precipitation, temperature, snowfall, heating and cooling degree days, growing-degree days, as well as frost and freeze dates spanning across close to 15,000 different observation sites. Most of them are owned and operated by NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS).

So what constitutes a "white Christmas"? According to NOAA, there needs to be at least one inch (0.03 meters) of snow on the ground on Dec. 25. In the map below, the information comes from the U.S. Climate Normals from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). The different colors represent the probability, according to measurements taken between 1991 and 2020 across the United States on Christmas Day, of what regions might have the best and worst chance of having a white Christmas. If your location falls in an area that's shaded in dark grey, unfortunately, you might have to head to typically colder spots as the probability is below 10%. The best scenario for snow on the ground on Christmas Day would be in a region highlighted in white, where probabilities exceed 90%.

However, just because the historic data instills confidence in what locations will have snow on the ground, it's all going to come down to what Mother Nature has in store this year on and leading up to Christmas Day.

If there's a huge snowstorm the day before Christmas, locations that might not typically have snow on the ground could experience a Christmas morning with the grass blanketed in white. For example, in 2009, a cold blast into North Texas brought with it accumulating snow just before the holiday. It remained on the ground into Christmas Day, which was a first for the region since 1926. And in 2023, Portland, Maine, had a wet and not white Christmas with warm air across the region, prohibiting the more likely chances for being a winter wonderland.

May the magical odds of the holiday spirit ever be in your favor this year, so your dreams of a white Christmas can come true!

SpaceX's plans to launch four small communications satellites to a high Earth orbit were called off as the countdown reached T-0 seconds on Saturday (Dec. 21).

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying four "MicroGEO" satellites built by San Francisco company Astranis had been scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at midnight EST (0500 GMT). An unspecified issue forced an abort just as the Falcon's Merlin engines were igniting.

"Standing down from tonight’s Falcon 9 launch," SpaceX stated in an update posted on the X social media network.

The company at first said that it was targeting Sunday morning for the next launch opportunity, but after further inspecting the Falcon 9 and reviewing the scrub data stood down from that try. A new target launch date has yet to be announced.

"Scrubs happen!" wrote Christian Keil, Astranis' vice president, on X. "We've seen worse and will try again soon."

One Astranis satellite has reached orbit to date, which explains the name that had been given to this launch — "Astranis: From One to Many."

Related: SpaceX: Facts about Elon Musk's private spaceflight company

Two of the four satellites that had been set to go up Saturday will be used by Colorado-based company Anuvu to provide in-flight connectivity for travelers. Another one will beam service to customers in the Philippines, and the fourth, called UtilitySat, is expected to serve a variety of customers throughout its life, according to Astranis.

"This is a huge milestone for Astranis. We’re going from one to many satellites, and this is the first time anyone has ever launched four satellites together like this," Astranis CEO John Gedmark said in a statement emailed before the launch attempt.

"These are our most advanced satellites yet, with a number of improvements that will generate increased capacity and affordability," he added. "We couldn’t be more excited to deliver for our customers, providing dedicated broadband networks in a way they can't get anywhere else."

The Falcon 9's upper stage was to deploy the four Astranis satellites into geosynchronous transfer orbit about 35 minutes after launch.

The quartet was then to make their way to geosynchronous orbit, a circular path 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth. At this altitude, orbital velocity matches the planet's rotational speed, allowing spacecraft to "hover" over the same patch of Earth continuously.

The Falcon 9's first stage, meanwhile, was to come back to Earth for a touchdown on the droneship "A Shortfall of Gravitas" about 8.5 minutes after launch. It would have been the 17th flight for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description.

By revising the order in which it will launch the station's modules to Earth orbit, Axiom Space will be able to start operating a free-flying platform as early as 2028, the Houston-based company announced this week.

Axiom previously planned to start operating its private space station in 2030, so the new plan moves up the timeline by two years.

NASA awarded Axiom Space a contract in 2020 to attach one or more modules to the International Space Station (ISS), which is set to retire by 2030 at the earliest. The original plan called for Axiom to detach a multi-module group from the ISS, creating a commercial outpost in low Earth orbit that will continue operating after the ISS is gone. But that plan has now been altered.

Related: Axiom Space: Building the off-Earth economy

"Our ongoing assessment of the assembly sequence revealed opportunities for flexibility and enhancements," Axiom Station program manager and Chief Operating Officer Mark Greeley said in a company statement on Dec. 18. "With the International Space Station needing to protect for the ability to accommodate a deorbit vehicle on station, we were able to accelerate this work to support the program's requirements."

To create its space station, Axiom plans to launch five modules: a payload/power/thermal element, an airlock, a research/manufacturing hub, and a pair of habitat modules. The original plan was for Axiom to launch the Habitat 1 module to the ISS first, followed by the additional elements.

The new assembly sequence will see the Payload, Power and Thermal module launch to the ISS first. This module could detach from the station — and become a free flyer called Axiom Station — as soon as 2028, according to the company.

After that happens, Axiom will continue assembling the outpost, launching the Habitat 1 module to meet up with it. Habitat 1 will be followed by the airlock, the Habitat 2 module, and then the research and manufacturing facility.

"The updated assembly sequence has been coordinated with NASA to support both NASA and Axiom Space needs and plans for a smooth transition in low Earth orbit," Angela Hart, a manager for the Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in an agency statement.

The new assembly sequence will help the Axiom space station to depart the ISS sooner, which means Axiom Station will be able to support free-flight operations faster than the original plan allowed. It also protects space on the ISS for a planned SpaceX deorbit vehicle, which will bring the huge outpost down for controlled destruction in Earth's atmosphere in 2030 or thereabouts.

"Our goal is to ensure a smooth transition from a government to a commercial platform, maintaining a continuous human presence on orbit to serve a community of global customers and partners, to include NASA," Greeley said in the Axiom statement.

Founded in 2016 and based in Houston, Axiom Space made history with its Ax-1 mission in April 2021, when the company became the first to bring a flight of all private citizens to the ISS.

With the ISS' impending retirement, a new era of private space stations is set for the coming years, with SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Space and others all looking to play a role.

An uncrewed Orion spacecraft successfully traveled thousands of miles beyond the moon and back, demonstrating its ability to one day transport astronauts to lunar orbit — but there are a few more tests the spacecraft has to ace before setting out on that cosmic feat.

The Artemis 1 mission that launched on Nov. 16, 2022 saw NASA's Orion spacecraft fly 1.4 million miles around the moon and back — the farthest a spacecraft built for humans has ever gone — and then execute a planned splash down in the Pacific Ocean to complete its in 25.5-day mission. Since then, the spacecraft has endured rigorous tests to ensure the safety and success of Artemis 2 — the first crewed mission under NASA's Artemis program, currently slated to launch in April 2026.

The crew module, now known as the Orion Environmental Test Article (ETA), recently completed an 11-month test campaign at NASA's Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio. The series of tests, which began in January 2024, simulated the extreme conditions of a launch abort scenario to see how the spacecraft would withstand an emergency event, according to a statement from NASA.

"This event would be the maximum stress and highest load that any of the systems would see," Robert Overy, Orion ETA project manager, NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, said in the statement. "We're taking a proven vehicle from a successful flight and pushing it to its limits. The safety of the astronaut crew depends on this test campaign."

During the tests, engineers and technicians from NASA and Lockheed Martin subjected the ETA to high noise levels that would be experienced if an abort occurred and simulated the separation sequence in which Orion — and astronauts inside — will jettison away from the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket during an emergency for a safe landing in the ocean.

NASA shared a slow motion video of the forward bay cover jettison test, which was completed on Nov. 23. The test demonstrated the processes for ejecting the spacecraft's docking module, which is required to properly unfold Orion's parachute system and deploy the five airbags designed to inflate upon splashdown, according to the statement.

Earlier tests subjected the ETA to simulated electromatic effects to ensure the spacecraft's grounding path would protect its equipment and systems from any potential damage it might endure if lighting were to strike while it waited on the launch pad for lift off.

"It's been a successful test campaign," Overy said in the statement. "The data has matched the prediction models, and everything operated as expected after being subjected to nominal and launch abort acoustic levels. We are still analyzing data, but the preliminary results show the vehicle and facility operated as desired."

The team also completed a docking mechanism jettison test on Nov. 11, 2024. This tested both connecting and disconnecting Orion to a Lunar Gateway, which is a small space station that will orbit the moon and serve as a staging point for missions to the lunar surface via a separate landing vehicle.

"These tests are absolutely critical because we have to complete all of these tests to say the spacecraft design is safe and we're ready to fly a crew for the first time on Artemis 2," Michael See, ETA vehicle manager for the Orion Program, said in the statement. "This is the first time we've been able to test a spacecraft on the ground in such an extreme abort-level acoustic environment."

The Artemis program aims to land humans on the moon for the first time since the Apollo missions managed to achieve the feat over 50 years ago. The primary goal of Artemis 2 is to conduct the first crewed test flight of the Orion spacecraft and the SLS rocket.

The approximate 10-day mission will carry four astronauts around the moon and then return to Earth. If all goes according to plan, Artemis 3 will then target a crewed lunar landing.

Photos captured in late October by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) show InSight resting on the Martian surface. While no longer active, the rover is providing researchers new data on how dust accumulates and evolves over time in the region.

"Even though we're no longer hearing from InSight, it's still teaching us about Mars," science team member Ingrid Daubar of Brown University said in a Dec. 16 NASA statement. "By monitoring how much dust collects on the surface — and how much gets vacuumed away by wind and dust devils — we learn more about the wind, dust cycle and other processes that shape the planet."

InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) landed on Mars in November 2018 in the western Elysium Planitia region, approximately 370 miles (600 kilometers) north of the Curiosity rover's location in Gale Crater. Its mission was to study Mars' interior structure and geological processes, as well as its thermal and chemical evolution, to gain a deeper understanding of how the Red Planet formed and developed over the past four billion years.

Related: InSight lander: Probing the Martian interior

During its four years of operational life, InSight used advanced instruments to study the Martian subsurface and uncover the processes that have shaped the terrestrial planets. It measured the planet's vital signs by analyzing its pulse through seismology, its temperature through heat flow and its reflexes through precision tracking.

InSight was the first mission to detect a "marsquake," recording a total of 1,319 temblors caused by both seismic activity and meteor impacts. "The seismic data alone from this Discovery Program mission offers tremendous insights not just into Mars but other rocky bodies, including Earth," Thomas Zurbuchen, then the associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a December 2022 statement.

Its seismometer was the last active science instrument before the rover was officially retired in December 2022. The mission ended after dust accumulation on its solar panels reduced its power supply, eventually cutting off communication with Earth. Despite this, engineers have continued listening for any radio signals from the lander, hoping that Martian winds might clear enough dust from the panels to allow it to resume operations.

The recent images taken by MRO show the solar panels have acquired the same reddish-brown hue as the rest of the planet. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California used the photos to estimate the amount of dust that had accumulated, which will help prepare for future missions.

NASA reported that, after having detected no changes over the past two years, they will stop listening for InSight at the end of this year.

"It feels a little bittersweet to look at InSight now," Daubar said. "It was a successful mission that produced lots of great science. Of course, it would have been nice if it kept going forever, but we knew that wouldn't happen."

Rocket Lab scrubbed what was to be its 16th Electron rocket flight of 2024 less than 20 minutes before planned liftoff at 10:03 a.m. EST (1503 GMT) from the company's primary launch site on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. Fueling of the rocket had already begun at the time of the scrub.

"We are standing down from today's launch attempt for Synspective to take a closer look at sensor data," Rocket Lab wrote in an update on social media. "We have backup opportunities in the coming days, so stand by for the new launch date shortly."

The Rocket Lab mission, called "Owl The Way Up," is carrying six Strix radar imaging satellites for the Japan-based company Synspective. Synspective is building a constellation of Strix satellites to "deliver imagery that can detect millimetre-level changes to the Earth’s surface from space," Rocket Lab wrote in a mission description.

Synspective has booked 16 launches of Strix satellites with Rocket Lab. The first Strix launch lifted off in December 2020. The upcoming "Owl The Way Up" mission will be the sixth Rocket Lab flight for Synspective.

Once Rocket Lab picks a new launch date for "Owl The Way Up," the company is expected to provide a livestream for the mission. You'll be able to watch the launch live via Rocket Lab's livestream page and YouTube channel. The webcast will begin about 20 minutes before liftoff.

In 2003, Hubble found a massive exoplanet. There's nothing too unusual about that, but closer inspection revealed the planet, called PSR B1620-26b, to be quite weird. It orbits not one but two objects, a pulsar and a white dwarf. These are the cinders of two dead stars — a massive star that went supernova and a sun-like star, respectively — and was the first circumbinary exoplanet to be discovered (circumbinary meaning orbiting two stars, like Tatooine in "Star Wars").

The planet lies in a globular cluster, Messier 4, over 6,000 light-years from Earth. Globular clusters are ancient, tightly packed balls of hundreds of thousands of stars. PSR B1620-26b remains the only planet to have been found in a globular cluster.

All of this evidence points to the most unusual thing about PSR B1620-26b, which is that it is very old. Estimates suggest that it formed 12.7 billion years ago, making it the oldest exoplanet known by far.

Yet Hubble's discovery was controversial. Perceived wisdom had been that planets could not have formed so early in the 13.7-billion-year history of the universe because there hadn't been enough time for generations of stars to produce many elements heavier than primordial hydrogen or helium, and planets generally need these heavier elements. This is especially true for the dusty, gaseous, planet-forming or "protoplanetary" disks around young stars.

"Current theoretical models predict that, with so few heavier elements, the disks around stars have a short lifetime, so short in fact that planets cannot grow big," said Elena Sabbi, chief scientist for the Gemini Observatory at NOIRLab in Arizona and a co-author of the new research, said in a statement. "But Hubble did see one of those planets, so what if the models were not correct and disks could live longer?"

Now JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec) instrument has found hard evidence that planet-forming disks can survive even when they contain relatively few heavy elements, strongly implying that planet formation was possible early in the universe's history, even if we don't fully understand how yet.

JWST excels at observing galaxies in the first billion years of cosmic time, but in this task it was pointed somewhere closer to home: the young star cluster NGC 346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), which is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way about 200,000 light-years away.

Dwarf galaxies like the SMC are often un-evolved when it comes to their chemistry because their history of star formation isn't very extensive, so they haven't had a chance to build up many heavy elements, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon or iron. NGC 346, for instance, contains about 10% the abundance of heavy elements that star-forming regions in our Milky Way galaxy have. This makes clusters such as NGC 346 great proxies for studying conditions akin to those found in the early universe.

NGC 346 is still forming lots of stars, and JWST found that many of the young ones, with ages of 20 to 30 million years, still possess planet-forming disks around them. Their existence confounds expectations.

"With Webb, we have a strong confirmation of what we saw with Hubble, and we must rethink how we create computer models for planet formation and early evolution in the young universe," said Guido De Marchi of the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands, who led the research.

A disk surviving 20 to 30 million years is an exceptionally long time; the protoplanetary disk in our solar system is not thought to have survived that long. The finding suggests that, not only can protoplanetary disks form and survive in environments lacking heavy elements, but they can also last longer, giving planets more time to assemble. While there may not be enough heavy elements to produce lots of rocky worlds, gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn are mostly hydrogen and helium, which is plentiful everywhere.

Related: Have astronomers found the 'secret recipe' for rapid planet growth?

So why do the planet-forming disks around the stars in NGC 346, and presumably stars in the early universe, last so long? De Marchi's team has two possible explanations.

One is that disks made almost entirely from hydrogen and helium are harder for starlight to blow away. Radiation pressure from the burgeoning star at the heart of the disk is usually what determines the lifetime of a disk, but the process is more efficient when there are heavy, dust-forming elements present in the disk for the star's photons to push on. Heavy-element-poor disks could therefore last longer.

The second possibility comes back to the formation of the star itself. In a nebula lacking heavy elements, it becomes harder for a gas cloud to collapse into a star; the cloud needs to grow more massive than is typical in the Milky Way today in order for it to grow cold enough for gravity to cause it to collapse. Larger clouds would result in larger disks carrying more mass, and that mass would take longer for the star's radiation to shift.

"With more matter around the stars, the accretion lasts for a longer time," said Sabbi. "The disks may take 10 times longer to disappear. This has implications for how you form a planet, and the type of planetary systems that you can have in these different environments. This is so exciting."

The new findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal on Dec. 16.

The sideways black hole was discovered in the galaxy NGC 5084, a lenticular (lens-shaped) galaxy located around 80 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Virgo. The black hole rotates in an unexpected direction in relation to its surrounding galaxy.

The team was tipped off to the existence of this black hole when they discovered two plumes of plasma, one that extends above and below the plane of the galaxy and one that stretches through the galaxy, crossing each other and making an "X" shape. This galactic structure is something astronomers have never seen before.

"Detecting two pairs of X-ray plumes in one galaxy is exceptional," team member and Ames Research Center astrophysicist Pamela Marcum said in a statement. "The combination of their unusual, cross-shaped structure and the 'tipped-over,' dusty disk gives us unique insights into this galaxy's history."

The scientists behind the discovery think that a dramatic event in the history of NGC 5084 may be responsible for knocking this black hole over on its side like a "cosmic hit and run."

X marks the WHAT?

The team made the discovery in archival data from Chandra thanks to a new image analysis they developed. This technique, "Selective Amplification of Ultra Noisy Astronomical Signal" or "SAUNAS," teases out low-brightness X-ray emissions from NASA's powerful X-ray space telescope, revealing the strange X-shaped twin plasma plumes.

This was odd because when astronomers see X-rays emitted from massive galaxies, they expect to find them evenly spread out. This homogeneity would result in a sphere of high-energy light. The sight of a concentrated shape of X-rays indicates a dramatic event in the history of a galaxy.

The discovery was so weird it immediately set the scientists scrambling to confirm it. They did this by scouring the archives of other telescopes and with new observations from two powerful ground-based observatories.

Observations from Hubble backed by data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), 66 radio antennas based in northern Chile, showed a dusty ring of material at the heart of NGC 5084, turning on its side. This indicated not only a black hole lurking at the center of this galaxy but that object was bizarrely rotated at a 90-degree angle to NGC 5084.

The follow-up examinations of NGC 5084 helped the team see this galaxy and its sideways black hole across a wide range of light wavelengths.

"It was like seeing a crime scene with multiple types of light," team leader and Ames Research Center scientist Alejandro Serrano Borlaff said in a statement. “Putting all the pictures together revealed that NGC 5084 has changed a lot in its recent past."

So what "crime" does the team suspect has taken place in NGC 5084 and knocked over this black hole?

Currently, the "prime suspect" in this cosmic whodunnit is a collision with another galaxy that generated a "chimney" of plasma that erupted from the top and bottom of NGC 5084's plane.

Though more investigations of NGC 5084 will be needed to properly determine the violent event that sculpted its strange structure, this research demonstrates the power of archival data, even dating back as far as three decades, to help scientists make new and unique discoveries.

This data is especially powerful when coupled with an innovative processing technique, such as that developed by Borlaff and colleagues.

The team's research was published on Wednesday (Dec. 18) in the Astrophysical Journal.

As far as meteor showers go, the Ursids aren't known to be particularly active. If viewing conditions are perfect, you might see upwards of 10 meteors per hour, according to In-the-Sky.org. But this year, the last quarter moon will interfere with the show, so it's best to keep expectations low — say, maybe five meteors per hour.

Still, you never know what might happen. Per EarthSky, the Ursids unexpectedly produced around 100 meteors per hour in 1945 and 1968 and some 30 meteors per hour in 1973.

The Ursids are named for their radiant, or the point from which they appear to emanate: the constellation Ursa Minor, also known as the Little Dipper. But they actually come from the comet 8P/Tuttle, or more specifically, the trail of debris it leaves behind on its orbit of the sun. As Earth moves into that trail, the debris burns up in our atmosphere, creating shooting stars.

If you're hoping to catch a glimpse of the show, here's what you need to know about the Ursids in 2024.

Related: Ursid meteor shower 2024: Everything you need to know

When is the best time to see the Ursid meteor shower?

The Ursids run from Dec. 17 to Dec. 26, with the peak occurring in the early morning of Dec. 22. While you can see them any time during the period, the best view will likely occur in the predawn hours of Dec. 22. That's when the radiant will be highest in the sky.

What are the viewing conditions for the Ursid meteor shower this year?

Unfortunately, the moon will be quite bright during the Ursid peak this year. It'll be approaching its last quarter phase at 54% illumination, meaning it'll be fairly bright in the night sky. The moon's light will likely drown out dimmer meteors.

How to look for the Ursids

All you have to do is bundle up and get out someplace dark with a wide view of the night sky. Let your eyes adjust to the darkness, then look up. You won't need to look directly at the radiant — in fact, it's better to look in a slightly different direction, as the meteors will be moving away from it.

When is the next meteor shower?

After the Ursids, the next meteor shower is the Quadrantids, which will peak the night of Jan. 2 into the morning of Jan. 3, 2025.

The service was formally established on Dec. 20, 2019, when President Donald Trump signed it into law with the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that allocates U.S. military spending each year. Since then, the U.S. Space Force has grown to nearly 15,000 servicemembers and civilian personnel. In its fifth year, Space Force has overseen astronaut launches from its facility at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and has even seen one of its own active Guardians, as Space Force members are known, launch into space.

From GPS navigation networks to weather forecasting, from broadband internet to early-warning missile detection systems, the U.S. (like many other nations) increasingly depends on space-based technologies for its way of life. Space Force's role in protecting and overseeing these technologies has evolved and grown over the last five years, and will likely continue to do so as it moves forward. But just what has Space Force accomplished in its first five years, and where will it go from here?

The 1st five years

When Space Force was established in 2019, the existing U.S. Air Force Space Command was inactivated and all of its space units were assigned to Space Force. From there, Space Force had to develop training materials, create new units dedicated to new types of missions, and even select new uniforms.

Related: What is the U.S. Space Force and what does it do?

To consolidate all of its missions under one command, the Space Force activated Space Operations Command at Peterson Air Force Base (now Peterson Space Force Base) in Colorado on Oct. 21, 2020.

Within two years, Space Force created Space Delta 1 at the base to serve as "America's epicenter of space power" and help support operations at dozens of locations worldwide, according to a Space Force statement.

Deltas are units with specific missions or functions, ranging from operations, facility support, or training. Space Launch Delta 45 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, for example, oversees all space launch operations from the U.S. East Coast.

With its basic organizational structure in place, Space Force, through the Air Force recruiting service, began the process of recruiting new Guardians in September 2020.

By December of that year, the service saw the first seven Guardians to enlist directly into the Space Force from basic training. "You will lay the foundation of a service that is innovative and can go fast in order to stay ahead of a significant and growing threat, and you, if deterrence fails, will fight and win the battle for space superiority which is so vital to our nation," then-Chief of Space Operations Gen. John "Jay" Raymond said at the enlistment ceremony.

In 2021, Space Force debuted its first official uniforms after getting its official flag and somewhat 'Star-Trek'-looking emblem.

By 2022, with its logistical and organizational structures in place, the service was already looking ahead to when it might be called upon to fight actual wars in space. Space Force began creating units dedicated to tracking threats in orbit or targeting adversarial nations' satellites.

Within just a few years, Space Force had its own large-scale training exercises and counterspace weaponry aimed solely at protecting American spacecraft or disrupting other nations' satellites in the event of a conflict.

To highlight this new focus, the service unveiled a lean new mission statement in September 2023 consisting of just nine brief words: "Secure our Nation's interests in, from, and to space."

Space Force reaches space

The first launch overseen by the U.S. Space Force took place in March 2020 when a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket launched an advanced communications satellite on behalf of the service. The satellite was designed to provide jam-proof high-speed communications between U.S. government leadership and deployed military forces.

In 2024, Space Force notched a huge milestone when it oversaw its first-ever astronaut launch. On June 5, 2024, an Atlas V took off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station carrying NASA astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, headed for the International Space Station.

Three months later, Space Force took another huge step into the final frontier when it sent its first active Guardian, NASA astronaut and U.S. Space Force colonel Nick Hague, on the SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the ISS.

Hague's launch was notable not only because he was the first active Guardian, but because his launch took place from Space Force's own launch facility, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. For Hague, being chosen for the mission was an honor.

"It's an honor for me to be able to represent all those Guardians that are around the globe that do all those things behind the scenes that make human spaceflight possible, whether that's launching us into space or it's protecting us while we're out there, by watching the skies and making sure things don't run into us," Hague told Space.com prior to launch.

From a piece of legislation to launching its own personnel from its own launch site, Space Force set a brisk pace in its first five years.

The service's current Chief of Space Operations, Gen. Chance Saltzman, highlighted the rapid growth of Space Force in remarks given at the Center for Strategic and International Studies' (CSIS) "Celebrating the U.S. Space Force and Charting Its Future" event in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 17.

"On average, we have tripled in size every year for the last five years in personnel, an astounding growth rate for any government organization," Saltzman said. "We have reimagined operations, redefined policies [and] reworked processes from the ground up to forge a service purpose-built for great power competition.

"All of this in just five years."

Where does Space Force go from here?

With five historic years under its belt, Space Force now looks forward to notching more milestones in the future. As always, with the U.S. military, many of the service's future plans are dictated by its budget. "Resources are going to dictate how far we can get over how much we can get accomplished in the next 12 months," Saltzman said at the CSIS event.

However, Saltzman outlined several high priorities for Space Force, including increasing its ability to support rapid launch timelines, developing and deploying new counterspace weapons, and creating Space Futures Command, a new field command that will "ensure competitiveness over time" through forecasting emerging technological developments and planning ways to leverage those for new capabilities and missions.

But above all, Saltzman stressed that the service has already accomplished a great deal and that Space Force has already proven itself capable of defending the United States' assets in space.

"Today, against all odds, I’m proud to say without question that Guardians are the preeminent space warfighters, armed and ready to protect and defend the future of our nation," Saltzman said.

Rocket Lab launched a private Earth-observing radar satellite to orbit today (Dec. 21) on the company's final mission of a busy 2024.

An Electron rocket lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site today at 9:16 a.m. EDT (1416 GMT; 3:16 a.m. Dec. 22 local New Zealand time), kicking off a mission called "Owl The Way Up."

That name was a reference to the payload — one of Japanese company Synspective's Strix radar-imaging satellites. (Strix is a widespread genus of owls.)

Everything went according to plan: The Electron deployed the Strix satellite into its target orbit 357 miles (574 kilometers) above Earth about 54.5 minutes after launch, according to the company.

Related: Rocket Lab launches 5 IoT satellites on landmark 50th mission (video)

"That rounds out 100% mission success for every launch this year. Congratulations team and thanks to all the customers that have flown with us in 2024. On to 2025……." Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said via X shortly after payload deployment.

Synspective has booked a total of 16 Electron launches to build out the Strix constellation in low Earth orbit, a system of "synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites designed to deliver imagery that can detect millimeter-level changes to the Earth's surface from space," Rocket Lab wrote in a mission description.

"Owl The Way Up" was the sixth of these 16 missions to fly.

Rocket Lab has now launched a total of 55 Electron missions to date, 14 of them this year. The company has also conducted three flights with HASTE, a suborbital version of Electron that serves as a testbed for hypersonic technology.

"Owl The Way Up" was originally supposed to launch on Friday (Dec. 20), but that attempt was scrubbed due to a sensor issue.

Editor's note: This piece was updated at 9:45 a.m. ET on Dec. 20 to reflect the scrub. It was updated again at 10:55 a.m. ET on Dec. 21 with news of successful launch and payload deployment.

Expedition 72 flight engineer Alexey Ovchinin secured his feet at one end of the European Robotic Arm (ERA) toward the end of his and Ivan Vagner's seven-hour extravehicular activity (EVA) today. Fellow Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexsandr Gorbunov controlled the 37-foot-long (11.3 meters) arm's movement from inside the space station.

At the desired point, Ovchinin tossed the bundle of no longer needed electrical connectors, covers and an experiment boom overboard such that it would no longer come in contact with the orbiting laboratory before burning up while reentering Earth's atmosphere.

"Here it goes, it is floating away," said Ovchinin as he released the bundle with a push toward the aft end of the space station. "It is going away nicely."

Related: Spacewalks: How they work and major milestones

Ovchinin and Vagner began the spacewalk at 10:36 a.m. EST (1536 GMT) as they opened the hatch to the airlock on the Poisk mini-research module. Once outside the station and having picked up the tools they needed for the excursion, the two cosmonauts proceeded to the Zvezda service module, where they installed the "All-Sky Monitor," an X-ray spectrometer.

Using the All-Sky Monitor, "scientists will conduct a periodic, almost full (84 percent) observation of the celestial sphere within the X-ray wavelength range every 72 days over three years (in all, 15 such observations are being planned)," according to a Roscosmos statement.

From there, Ovchinin and Vagner worked on swapping out four electrical connector patch panels on the outside of Zvezda with new replacements. The old panels were part of the bundle that Ovchinin disposed of later in the spacewalk.

The cosmonauts also collected experiments that exposed materials ("Test and Endurance") and biological samples ("Control") to assess their reaction to the space environment. Ovchinin and Vagner brought the experiment panels back inside the station to be returned to Earth on a Soyuz spacecraft for further study on the ground.

As a final task, the spacewalkers jettisoned towels that they used to wipe down their spacesuits' gloves before reentering the airlock.

Due to time constraints, the spacewalkers forewent the relocation of an exterior control panel for the European Robotic Arm. The move would have cleared a translation path for future EVAs but otherwise was not critical to station operations.

Thursday's spacewalk ended at 5:53 p.m. (2253 GMT), 7 hours and 17 minutes after it began. It was the 272nd EVA in support of the assembly, maintenance and upgrade of the International Space Station since 1998.

This was the first spacewalk during Expedition 72 and the third conducted at the International Space Station this year (including a U.S. spacewalk that was cut short at just 31 minutes due to a water leak while both crew members were still inside the Quest airlock). Five additional spacewalks were performed in 2024, including four outside China's Tiangong space station by the Shenzhou 17, 18 and 19 crews and the world's first commercial spacewalk, conducted by the Polars Dawn crew outside a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

It was Ovchinin's second EVA and Vagner's first. Ovchinin previously conducted a six hour and one minute spacewalk in 2019, such that his total is now 13 hours and 18 minutes working in the vacuum of space.

The flights were booked by California company Vast Space, which is developing a private space station called Haven-1 that could reach orbit as soon as next year, also atop a Falcon 9.

‍"Enabling payload and crewed missions to the ISS is a key part of Vast’s strategy, allowing us to further our collaboration with NASA and global space agencies," Vast Space CEO Max Haot said in a statement.

"These missions not only strengthen our expertise in human spaceflight operations and collaboration with NASA, but also position Vast as a leading contender to deliver the next-generation successor to the ISS, advancing the future of human space exploration," Haot added.

NASA plans to select and nurture that successor via its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destination program. Vast has thrown its hat in the ring with its Haven-2 design, a larger, more advanced version of the Haven-1 pathfinder. Haven-2's first module could be up and running in low Earth orbit by 2028, two years before the ISS' envisioned retirement, according to the company.

Related: Vast Space unveils Haven-2, a private space station to follow the ISS after its fiery end (video)

Vast's newly booked flights to the ISS would be private astronaut missions (PAMs), short-duration jaunts that must be approved by NASA.

So far, NASA has greenlit a total of four PAM flights, all of them proposed by Houston-based company Axiom Space, with SpaceX as the hardware partner. Axiom has flown three of them already and plans to launch the fourth, called Ax-4, this coming spring.

NASA has not yet approved Vast's planned PAM flights, but SpaceX said it'll be ready to send them on their way when the time comes.

"I am excited to work with Vast as they build more opportunities and destinations for more people to travel amongst the stars," SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said in the same statement.