WASHINGTON, D.C. — NASA is set to launch the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory mission in September 2025, honoring the late Dr. George R. Carruthers, whose groundbreaking work at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) transformed how we observe Earth and space.

A discovery involving researchers at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) has, for the first time, unveiled millisecond pulsations hidden within a powerful cosmic explosion known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB). A collaboration among HKU, Nanjing University, and the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) detected a brief but highly coherent oscillation in the GRB designated GRB 230307A on 7 March 2023. The signal, spinning nearly a thousand times per second, points to the birth of a “millisecond magnetar”—a rapidly rotating neutron star with an ultra-strong magnetic field. The findings have recently been published in Nature Astronomy, marking a milestone in astrophysics and providing the clearest evidence yet that magnetars can power some of the most luminous explosions in the universe.

SAN ANTONIO — September 22, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is managing the payload of instruments aboard NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) spacecraft scheduled to launch Wednesday, September 24, 2025 at 7:30 a.m. EST from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The payload, including the SwRI-developed Compact Dual Ion Composition Experiment (CoDICE) instrument, will study the interaction between the solar wind and the interstellar medium that surrounds it.

Australia’s SpIRIT nanosatellite has successfully completed the initial phase of its mission, marking a milestone achievement for Australia’s place and reputation in the global space industry.

Led by the University of Melbourne, in collaboration with the Italian Space Agency (ASI), the Space Industry Responsive Intelligent Thermal nanosatellite – known as ‘SpIRIT’ – is the first space telescope funded by the Australian Space Agency to carry a foreign space agency’s scientific instrument as its main payload.

The 2025 Europlanet Prize for Public Engagement has been awarded to Red de Estudiantes Colombianos en Astronomía (RECA) Educación, a Colombian non-profit network of volunteers that aims to bring science, astronomy and planetary science to schools and communities across Colombia.  RECA Educación representatives Laura Ramirez Galeano and Natalia Oliveros received the prize, which comes with a cash award of €1000, and gave a lecture during the opening ceremony of the joint meeting of Europlanet Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science (EPSC-DPS2025) in Helsinki.