Space 2 November 2025 - 18 December 2025

December 18, 2025 — The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is back in the spotlight today as it heads into a key milestone: its closest approach to Earth early Friday, Dec. 19. It won’t be a dramatic “near miss” in everyday terms—NASA emphasizes the comet will remain about 1.8 astronomical units away—but in astronomy, that’s close enough to trigger an all-hands observation push across telescopes and spacecraft. NASA Science Today’s coverage is dominated by two themes: how to watch the flyby in real time, and what scientists are learning from this rare visitor from another star system—only the third interstellar object ever confirmed passing through our solar system. NASA Science+1

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS – also known as C/2025 N1 – has gone from obscure discovery to the most talked‑about object in the Solar System in just a few months. As of December 2, 2025, astronomers are reporting: All of this is happening while NASA, ESA and observatories worldwide repeat the same core message: 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet from another star system, and it poses no threat to Earth. NASA Science+1

Warsaw / Vandenberg, California – 27 November 2025 Poland will have to wait a little longer for its historic debut as a military space power. A Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, carrying Poland’s first military reconnaissance satellite and three accompanying defence nanosatellites, has been pushed back from Wednesday to Friday after a late scrub of the Transporter‑15 mission. Polskie Radio online

Updated Monday, November 10, 2025 — Cape Canaveral, Florida Blue Origin’s second New Glenn mission — poised to send NASA’s twin ESCAPADE probes toward Mars — did not fly today. After a weather scrub on Sunday, Nov. 9, the company now targets Wednesday, Nov. 12, with a 2:50–4:17 p.m. EST launch window from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral. Blue Origin says it worked with the FAA and the range to select this new window, citing continued concerns about weather and sea-state conditions for booster recovery. Blue Origin

Key facts: While 3I/ATLAS was hidden in the Sun’s glare in late October, it slipped into the fields of view of several solar‑monitoring cameras: STEREO‑A, SOHO/LASCO C3 and NOAA’s GOES‑19 CCOR‑1 coronagraph. A new analysis by Qicheng Zhang and Karl Battams reports an extra‑steep brightening as perihelion approached, and color photometry showing the comet was bluer than the Sun, signaling that glowing gas dominated the visible output near perihelion. This is precisely the regime where sublimating volatiles can surge. arXiv

On Nov 2 evening, ISRO will attempt a landmark mission by launching CMS-03 – also known as GSAT-7R – atop its powerful LVM3-M5 launcher. The satellite, dedicated to the Indian Navy, aims to bolster India’s maritime communications and domain awareness. At liftoff, the 43.5 m-tall “Bahubali” rocket will carry CMS-03 into a geostationary transfer orbit, from which the spacecraft will later circularize to geostationary orbit. Weighing roughly 9,700 lbs, CMS-03 will become the heaviest communications satellite launched by an Indian rocketspace.commoneycontrol.com. ISRO itself calls this a record: it will be the first time a satellite over 4 tonnes is put into distant orbit from Indian soil. “The CMS-03 satellite will be injected into a Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit by ISRO’s Launch Vehicle Mark-3,” according to ISRO’s announcements. In practice, once CMS-03 reaches the transfer orbit it will fire its own engine to reach a circular geostationary orbit ~35,786 km above Earth, hovering over a fixed longitude. As Space.com explains, at that altitude the satellite’s orbital speed matches Earth’s rotation so it can “hover” over one region continuouslyspace.com.