This Week in Space: Two Worlds, One Sun & Mission Milestones

Introduction

Welcome to another exciting week!

Best image of the week

This week’s standout comes from APOD’s “Two Worlds, One Sun,” featured on June 15, 2025. It pairs a Martian sunset captured by Curiosity in Gale Crater in 2015 with an Earth sunset from Marseille in 2012, each scaled to the same angular diameter. The Martian dusk displays a striking blue hue—caused by forward scattering of light by fine dust in the thin atmosphere—while the terrestrial sunset remains its familiar orange. The subtle difference in apparent solar diameter also highlights Mars’ roughly 1.5-AU distance from the Su

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Last week news

• June 9, 2025: NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX postponed the Axiom Mission 4 launch from Kennedy Space Center due to forecasted weather in the Dragon ascent corridor, rescheduling for June 11 and underlining the complexities of crewed station flights.

• June 12, 2025: Controllers detected and sealed a slow air leak in the Zvezda service module on the International Space Station, temporarily delaying the Axiom Mission 4 docking and prompting additional safety inspections of Russian‐segment components.

• June 13, 2025: NASA’s PUNCH mission released its first detailed coronal mass ejection images, capturing the rapid expansion of solar plasma into interplanetary space and providing new data for space‐weather forecasting.

• June 14, 2025: For the first time, astronomers merged Chandra X-ray and James Webb infrared data to map the “Green Monster” filaments in the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant, revealing complex shockwave structures in the debris of a star that exploded about 340 years ago.

Upcoming events

• June 16, 2025: ULA’s Atlas V 551 will deliver Amazon’s second batch of Kuiper broadband satellites (KA-02) from Cape Canaveral, moving toward global internet coverage.

• June 17, 2025: SpaceX will launch Starlink Group 15-9 from Vandenberg SFB aboard Falcon 9, continuing its rapid low-Earth-orbit constellation build-out.

• June 18, 2025: Falcon 9 returns to Cape Canaveral for Starlink Group 10-18, marking three Starlink missions in under a week and showcasing industry-leading launch cadence.

• June 19, 2025: The Axiom-4 mission—featuring ISRO astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon—is scheduled to lift off from Kennedy Space Center, representing India’s first crewed flight on a private station mission.

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