ALT Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander captured a bright image of the Moon’s South Pole (on the far left) through the cameras on its top deck, while it travels to the Moon. The Moon has a bright white glow at the top of the image. On the left, a heavily cratered area (the South Pole) is visible. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

ALT A massive crane lifts NASA’s Orion spacecraft out of the Final Assembly and System Testing cell and moves it to the altitude chamber to complete further testing on Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, inside the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The altitude chamber simulates deep space vacuum conditions, and the testing will provide additional data to augment data gained during testing earlier this summer. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

ALT NASA’s SPHEREx mission will survey the Milky Way galaxy looking for water ice and other key ingredients for life. In the search for these frozen compounds, the mission will focus on molecular clouds — collections of gas and dust in space — like this one imaged by the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope.