You have a lot to know about this week’s space. Stay connected with us till the end for the news of Amazing Space Week.
- Crewed mission returns: Axiom-4 splashdown
- SpaceX LaunchesÂ
- China docks Tianzhou-9 to TiangongÂ
- Black hole merger detectedÂ
- Asteroid 2022 YS5 makes a close pass
- Relay-2 radio pulse after 60 years silent
AXIOM-4 CREWED MISSION:
Image Credit: Axiom
Axiom 4 mission was launched towards ISS, in which 4 countries, the US, India, Poland, and Hungary were included and each of them was an astronaut who was a part of this mission and after spending 20 days in space i.e. in International Space Station (ISS) returned to earth on Tuesday July 15 at 4:31 am CT.
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SpaceX played a very good role in this, as SpaceX’s crew dragon capsule “Grace” splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of California.
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This mission included 4 astronauts from 4 nations, including Peggy Whitson, who is a NASA astronaut and, for now, the director of Axiom in this mission. Americans have spent 695 days in space in human spaceflight.
The spacecraft will now execute a series of departure burns to move away from the @Space_Station. Dragon will reenter the Earth's atmosphere and splash down in ~22.5 hours off the coast of California pic.twitter.com/5Wmqr3f63Z
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 14, 2025
Shubanshu Shukla, who also served in Axiom 4 mission as a pilot who belongs to India, who is a pilot in the Indian Air Force and also an astronaut who has been selected by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) which is planning to launch its first human mission named Gaganyan and it is expected to be launched by 2027.
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Or the remaining two astronauts include a specialist named SÅ‚awoz Uznanski-Wisniewski, who is from Poland and is part of the astronauts reserve program of the European Space Agency (ESA), or Tibor Kapu, a mission specialist who is from Hungary or a member of the orbital astronaut program of Hungary.
Space Launches July 11-17
Image Credit: SpaceX
Talking about the launch, several space launches took place this week, and all the launches were conducted by one American aerospace company, SpaceX, which launched from sites in the United States.
You can see some details here:
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1. Israel’s “Dror-1” Communication Satellite
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Launch Date: July 12-13, 2025 (local time)
Country: USA (from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida)
Company: SpaceX
Purpose: The purpose of this launch is to advance Israel’s national communication satellites. And the purpose of this mission is to enhance and secure Israel’s communication capabilities.
2. Amazon’s “Project Kuiper” Mission
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Launch Date: July 15, 2025
Country: USA (from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida)
Company: SpaceX
Purpose: This launch was done by Amazon to deploy a batch of satellites of Amazon’s large constellation Project Kuiper in low Earth orbit so that Amazon’s internet service could be expanded. This mission was the first one that SpaceX scheduled for Amazon out of the remaining two missions.
3.SpaceX’s “Starlink” Mission
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Launch Date: July 16-17, 2025
Country: USA (from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California)
Company: SpaceX
Purpose: The purpose of this mission is to deploy a batch of Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit, which were launched by SpaceX with the help of its Falcon 9 rocket. This will help Starlink to further expand its internet delivery service worldwide. In areas where there is no internet yet.
Tianzhou 9 Cargo Spacecraft
China also launched its Tiangong 9 mission, which was for resupply at the International Space Station, and it was a cargo mission weighing 7 tons.
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How did this cargo lift off with a Long March 7 rocket? As you can see in the video, this launch took place from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center located on Hainan Island on July 14 at 5:34 pm EDT.
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These supplies included food, fuel, and a variety of hardware, including scientific equipment including spacesuits. source: space.com
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Tiangong 9 space station will set another core muscle set as a training device. It will also upgrade the existing gym in the space station. It will help taikonauts (in China, it means astronauts) to prevent muscle atrophy in microgravity.
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This mission was basically to attach a module to the ISS, as China has already done this many times, which includes that in October 2022, China attached three modules to the Tiangong space station. Which is 20% of the International Space Station. But it is not finished yet. China plans to expand Tiangong further in the coming years.
Largest Black Hole Merger
Scientists have recently detected two massive black holes merging, something that was never seen before. They are like titanic collisions in spacetime, and this is called gravitational waves.
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These are black holes that keep changing the current model of our view of the universe.
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This event, which was recently recorded by gravitational wave detectors, forces physicists to rethink the model of our universe as we now know it.
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These black holes, which are 100 times more massive than our sun, are circling each other and merging, and because of this, they have become even more naked, and they exist 10 billion light years away from our Earth.
