The Planetary Society's Best of 2025 Awards

Best space exploration image:

Best performance by a celestial body:

Best performance by a space science mission

Best “Fact Worth Sharing” from our weekly Downlink newsletter:

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is the fastest natural object ever recorded in our Solar System.
It is moving at 209,000 kilometers (130,000 miles) per hour, likely sped up by gravitational slingshots from stars and nebulae over the billions of years it has been drifting through interstellar space.

Earth is slowly shrinking.
Every year, our planet gains about 45,000 metric tons of mass from meteorites and dust that falls to the surface. At the same time, Earth loses about 100,000 tons of mass through the escape of atmospheric gases.

Comets are simultaneously tiny and huge.
The body (or nucleus) of the average comet is only a few kilometers or miles across or smaller, but comet ion tails can extend to over 100 million kilometers (62 million miles) — sometimes even stretching farther than the distance between Earth and the Sun.

Saturn’s 274 moons amount to more than the total number of known moons around all the other planets combined.
The ringed planet has nearly three times as many known moons as the next most moon-adorned planet, Jupiter.

The Parker Solar Probe’s ultra-close pass of the Sun sped it up to record-breaking speeds.
At its fastest, it traveled at a staggering 692,000 kilometers per hour (430,000 miles per hour), or about 192 kilometers per second (119 miles per second).

Best Planetary Society accomplishment (thanks to the support of our members!)

If you had any favorites from the year in space that weren’t on these lists, share them in The Planetary Society’s online member community! This is where space enthusiasts come together to share and discuss the latest in space science, exploration, and much more. It’s exclusive to Planetary Society members, so join us today if you haven’t already!