The IWF wishes a Merry Christmas

23.12.2025

Before the current year slowly draws to a close, the Graz Space Research Institute would like to take a look back.

On 8 January 2025, the ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission flew past Mercury for the sixth time, successfully completing the final 'gravity assist manoeuvre' needed to steer it into orbit around the planet in November 2026.

Two space missions with Graz magnetometers on board were successfully launched this year: The second China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES-2) was placed in a sun-synchronous polar orbit on 14 June 2025. Space Weather Follow On–Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on 24 September 2025.

ESA's JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) passed its closest point to Venus on 31 August, as it completed the second of four planned gravity assists.

Among numerous publications, two articles appeared in Nature Communications (Michael Steindorfer et al. and Daniel Schmid et al.) and two in Nature Astronomy (Helmut Lammer et al. and Ryan C. Challener et al.), three of them led by IWF researchers.

Name	Purpose	Storage duration	Type	Provider
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