🚀 Space Pulse · 2026-07-25 22:01 UTC

SPACE PULSE

Saturday, 26 July 2026 — 22:00 UTC Edition

⚡ TL;DR

NASA's CAPSTONE 02 moon demo contract and New Glenn hot-fire deal mark a big Artemis infrastructure day, while ESCAPADE's Earth-Moon family portrait reminds us two Mars probes are already en route.

A busy week ahead: SpaceX Starlink launch Tuesday, Rocket Lab iQPS SAR satellite Friday, and ISS commander handover completing tomorrow.

🚀 LAUNCHES

UPCOMING THIS WEEK

• SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 will loft Starlink Group 17-52, a batch of 24 broadband satellites, targeting 29 July at 02:00 UTC. ^[1]
• Rocket Lab Electron "The Grain Goddess Provides" carries iQPS Launch 7, a synthetic aperture radar Earth-observation satellite for Japanese imaging company iQPS, targeting 31 July. ^[2]

ON THE HORIZON

• JAXA / Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H3-22 rocket is go for launch with Michibiki 7 (QZS-7), the seventh satellite for Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System regional navigation network, targeting 6 August at 19:30 UTC. ^[3]
• China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation has a Long March 7A launch with an unspecified payload penciled in for 9 August at 11:00 UTC, details to be confirmed. ^[4]

🔭 DISCOVERIES

NASA ESCAPADE MILESTONE

• On 3 July one of NASA's two ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) spacecraft photographed Earth and the Moon in both visible and thermal infrared light from 363,250 miles (584,600 km) out, a striking early-cruise health check for the Mars-bound duo. ^{[5] [6]}

NASA X-59 QUESST UPDATE

• NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center has assigned research test pilot Mike Lippert to the X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft program; the jet hit Mach 1-plus for the first time on 5 June 2026, and Lippert will fly alongside F-15 and F/A-18 support aircraft for the Quesst sonic-boom community-noise campaign. ^[7]

MARS CLIMATE SCIENCE

• NASA Ames' Mars Climate Modeling Center is running updated Mars Global Climate Models covering present-day atmosphere, ancient climate, and future human-exploration scenarios, with all model output now publicly accessible through an interactive online dashboard on the NAS Data Portal. ^{[8] [9]}

ISS CREW ARRIVAL

• Expedition 74 flight engineers Anna Kikina and Pyotr Dubrov (Roscosmos) and Anil Menon (NASA) arrived at the International Space Station on 14 July 2026 and are wrapping up their first working weekend with biomedical checks, spacesuit maintenance, and Soyuz MS-28 cargo packing ahead of a commander handover Saturday. ^[10]

🛰️ MISSIONS

• NASA and Blue Origin have signed an annex to a reimbursable Space Act Agreement for New Glenn second-stage hot-fire testing on the B-2 stand at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, directly advancing the rocket's role in future Artemis missions.
• NASA has awarded Advanced Space a contract for CAPSTONE 02, a cislunar technology demonstration that will test rendezvous and proximity operations in lunar orbit, building on the original CAPSTONE pathfinder and supporting the agency's Artemis Moon Base cislunar infrastructure goals.
• The Habitable Worlds Observatory Science Interest Group has scheduled a community seminar for 12 August 2026, with NASA's Ad Astra large-mission community workshop to follow 1-3 September 2026, both aimed at shaping the next flagship astrophysics mission.

☀️ SPACE WEATHER

NOTE: The most recent NOAA SWPC alerts in today's feed date from late June and early July 2026. No fresh alerts within the past 24 hours are present in the data; the items below summarize the last notable activity cluster.

• On 30 June, NOAA confirmed an X1.1 solar flare peaking at 20:50 UTC from active region N18W18, reaching R3-Strong radio blackout level; an associated Type II radio emission indicated a coronal mass ejection shock moving at an estimated 1,496 km/s, with a Type IV continuum emission following.
• That same CME sequence drove G1-Minor geomagnetic storming (K-index 5) on 30 June into 1 July, with NOAA extending a K4 warning through 1 July 21:00 UTC and a G2-Moderate storm watch issued for 3 July.
• GOES-18 recorded a second high-energy electron flux alert on 17 July, with 2 MeV integral flux crossing 1,000 pfu after a prior-day maximum of 1,382 pfu, indicating continued energetic particle activity in the outer radiation belt.

📄 RESEARCH

HUBBLE TENSION — TWO NEW TAKES

• A paper dubbed "Hubble tension: the shape wall" argues that late-time cosmological solutions face not just the well-known normalization wall from BAO measurements of H0 times the sound horizon, but an additional "shape wall" from the BAO scale itself, further constraining popular fixes to the ~5-sigma discrepancy in the Hubble constant.
• A companion short review surveys the full landscape of theoretical explanations for the Lambda-CDM vs. local-distance-ladder discrepancy, providing an accessible map of where each class of model succeeds or fails.

AGN FEEDBACK IN GALAXY SIMULATIONS

• Comparing three major cosmological simulations — Magneticum, IllustrisTNG, and Simba — researchers identify what each feedback prescription gets right and wrong in balancing gas reservoirs and star formation across cosmic time, pointing to missing physics in current active galactic nuclei models that causes disagreement with observed galaxy populations.

COSMIC RAYS AND THE LARGE MAGELLANIC CLOUD

• A new study titled "Spirited Away" explains why the Large Magellanic Cloud emits far less gamma-ray light than standard cosmic-ray models predict: cosmic rays are being advectively blown out of the LMC into the Milky Way's circumgalactic medium before they can interact and produce gamma rays, resolving a persistent modeling anomaly.

CME 3D EXPANSION STUDY

• Researchers used true three-dimensional reconstructions (moving beyond 2D projected models) to compare how fast and slow coronal mass ejections expand both radially and laterally, finding that expansion asymmetry strongly influences CME width evolution and therefore the probability and duration of Earth-directed impacts.

TITAN BENZENE CLOUD EXPERIMENT

• New laboratory measurements of benzene ice critical saturation ratios on Titan tholins — the organic haze particles revealed by Cassini CIRS during the 2009 southern autumn — are used to refine microphysical cloud models, improving predictions of how benzene clouds form and evolve at Titan's south pole.

Space Pulse is grounded in official sources: NASA, ESA, JAXA, NRAO, NOAA SWPC, and arXiv astro-ph. All times UTC.

📎 Sources

1. Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 17-52 — Launch Library 2
2. Electron | The Grain Goddess Provides (iQPS Launch 7) — Launch Library 2
3. H3-22 | Michibiki 7 (QZS-7) — Launch Library 2
4. Long March 7A | Unknown Payload — Launch Library 2
5. NASA’s ESCAPADE Snaps Family Portrait of Earth, Moon — NASA News Releases
6. NASA’s ESCAPADE Snaps Family Portrait of Earth, Moon — NASA Science
7. Meet NASA’s New X-59 Test Pilot — NASA Science
8. MCMC Science — NASA Science
9. MCMC Model Visualizer — NASA Science
10. New Crew Members Welcomed to International Space Station — NASA News Releases

Curated from official sources — NASA/ESA/JAXA/ESO/NOAA/arXiv/Launch Library. Informational only.
Serial 20260725-22-v38 · 2026-07-25 22:01 UTC · pulse.uzylab.com