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.

Origami device fabrication has huge potential in the fields of health, agriculture, and space technology. However, portability of the presently used fabrication devices is a concern and on-site production of three-dimensional (3D) devices remains a challenge. To address this, researchers have developed a portable, multimaterial printer using electrowetting on dielectric technology. This device allows rapid fabrication of 3D devices, eliminating the challenges of the existing technologies and improving the applicability of paper-based devices.

The University of Surrey, United Kingdom, and National Central University (NCU), Taiwan, have announced plans to work together on a broad programme of potential collaborations, identifying areas for future work, including the sharing of space radiation data, collaboration on the design of future instruments to measure it, and the development of resilient space infrastructure. 

New simulations of neutron star mergers reveal that the mixing and changing of tiny particles called neutrinos impacts how the merger unfolds, as well as the resulting emissions. The findings have implications for longstanding questions about the origins of metals and rare earth elements as well as understanding physics in extreme environments.