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Space

🚀 Space Pulse · 2026-09-17 22:01 UTC

SPACE PULSE

Thursday, September 18, 2026

⚡ TL;DR

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted what scientists are calling a once-in-a-century fresh impact crater on the Moon, making it the headline find of the day. The week's launch cadence is high, with five missions cleared "Go for Launch" between now and September 22, headlined by Starship Flight 14's first-ever satellite deployment attempt.

🚀 LAUNCHES

RECENT

  • SpaceX Falcon 9 successfully flew USSF-259 on September 17 at 01:07 UTC, a classified U.S. Space Force mission likely carrying Starshield-bus LEO satellites based on ascent stage drop-zone patterns. [1]
  • CASC Long March 12 lifted off September 17 at 00:30 UTC carrying an undisclosed payload; details remain TBD. [2]

UPCOMING

  • Rocket Lab Electron is set for September 19 at 03:15 UTC, carrying StriX Launch 12, a synthetic aperture radar satellite for Japanese Earth-imaging firm Synspective. [3]
  • SpaceX Falcon 9 is go for launch September 20 at 01:47 UTC with Starlink Group 15-27, a batch of 27 broadband satellites. [4]
  • CAS Space Kinetica 1 is go for launch September 20 at 04:00 UTC with an undisclosed payload. [5]
  • SpaceX Starship Flight 14 is go for launch September 22 at 12:15 UTC — the 3rd flight of Starship V3 and the first Starship mission to attempt actual satellite deployment, releasing Starlink Group 31-1 into stable LEO. [6]
  • ULA Vulcan VC6L is scheduled for September 30 to carry Amazon Project Kuiper broadband constellation satellites (LV-01), marking a major milestone for Amazon's LEO internet megaconstellation. [7]
  • CASC Long March 8A and Long March 12A Flight 2 are both scheduled for September 30 with TBD payloads; Long March 12A will be only its second test launch. [8] [9]
  • Russian Space Forces Soyuz 2.1b/Fregat is also penciled for September 30 with a classified military payload; launch vehicle identity remains highly uncertain. [10]

🔭 DISCOVERIES

  • NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter scientist Robert Wagner spotted an unusually large bright spot circled by a dark halo while doing routine data-quality checks — confirmed as a fresh impact crater NASA is calling a once-in-a-century event on the lunar surface.
  • Astronomers have confirmed Elias 2-24 b as the youngest known planet, less than one million years old and still embedded in its natal dust-and-gas disk, using NASA-funded archive data; the find challenges existing planet-formation models.
  • ESO's Very Large Telescope has delivered the clearest image yet of what appears to be a companion star to Betelgeuse, providing the strongest evidence to date that the famous red supergiant is not alone.
  • NASA's SPHEREx mission has detected a large, nearly circular shell around the red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, a remarkable structure revealed by the new space telescope's infrared eyes.
  • Sakurai's Object, a rare born-again stellar remnant first detected in 1996, has now developed confirmed Wolf-Rayet-type emission features, marking the emergence of a [WC]-type star in real time on human timescales.
  • NASA's Curiosity rover reached its 5,000th Martian day (sol) on Mars, capturing a panoramic postcard from a sand ridge nicknamed Chocolatal using its navigation cameras on August 30 and September 2, 2026.
  • Progress 96 cargo spacecraft launched September 16 at 9:33 a.m. EDT and is set to deliver nearly three tons of food, fuel, and supplies to the ISS with automated docking to the Poisk module on Saturday.
  • NASA's 50th anniversary retrospective today marks the September 17, 1976 public unveiling of Space Shuttle orbiter OV-101 Enterprise, renamed from Constitution after a fan letter-writing campaign drew nearly 100,000 responses.

🛰️ MISSIONS

  • ESA signed 18 consolidation contracts pooling nearly 80 companies to study low-LEO mission concepts and secure connectivity services for IRIS², the EU's secure satellite communications constellation, advancing it to its next development phase.
  • ESA's Galileo navigation system achieved its first civil authenticated position fix under active spoofing conditions on September 16, with five operational satellites broadcasting a new encrypted test signal over Europe for two hours; receivers at Andoya, Norway and ESA-ESTEC confirmed the fix.
  • ESA honored three unnamed space companies with excellence and innovation awards at its Industry Space Days 2026 event at ESTEC on September 16.
  • JAXA's ibSLS integrated biobank, drawing on data and biological samples from the Kibo Mouse Space Mission aboard the ISS, has entered full operations to advance research in space medicine, aging, and human disease.
  • NASA's Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Community Participation Program has assembled seven U.S.-based teams to prepare technology demonstration observations ahead of Roman's operational phase.
  • A new study combining stellar kinematics data from MaNGA and HI dynamics from ALFALFA finds that massive galaxy halos contain less dark matter in their inner regions than standard cosmological models predict.

☀️ SPACE WEATHER

  • Space weather has been quiet in the immediate run-up to today; a G2 Moderate geomagnetic storm watch issued September 8 was cancelled on September 9, with actual conditions falling below G1 Minor on both days.
  • The most recent elevated activity dates to September 8-9, when NOAA GOES-19 registered a G1 Minor geomagnetic storm (K-index 5) and a high-energy electron flux alert with 2 MeV integral flux reaching 1,540 pfu at peak — above the 1,000 pfu alert threshold.
  • No active space weather alerts are current as of this edition; conditions are calm.

📄 RESEARCH

  • LHAASO J2108+5157 MYSTERY SOURCE: A new arXiv paper proposes that this puzzling ultra-high-energy gamma-ray source, detected up to hundreds of TeV with no clear lower-frequency counterpart, may be a remnant of a microquasar — an accreting black hole or neutron star system that shut down long ago.
  • ANDROMEDA GALAXY STAR DROUGHT: A study finds M31, our nearest large galactic neighbor, forms stars far less efficiently than comparable galaxies, and traces the cause to a shortage of gravitationally bound gas rather than a lack of raw material overall.
  • YOUNGEST PLANET RECORD BROKEN: Independent analysis of Elias 2-24 b confirms a planet under one million years old still forming in its protoplanetary disk, pushing the observational frontier of planet formation to its youngest limit yet.
  • GRAVITATIONAL WAVE OPTICAL SEARCH: The Wide Field Survey Telescope followed up S251112cm, an unusual gravitational-wave candidate with possible subsolar-mass components that cannot be easily explained by standard neutron star or black hole mergers, searching for an optical kilonova-type counterpart.
  • FIRST STRONGLY LENSED SUPERLUMINOUS SUPERNOVA: Follow-up work on SN 2025wny — a Type I superluminous supernova at redshift 2.015, multiply imaged by two foreground galaxies at redshift 0.375 — confirms it as the first strongly lensed SLSN ever found, opening a new window on extreme stellar explosions at cosmological distances.
  • SOLAR NEUTRINOS COME OF AGE: A perspective paper argues that after 60 years of solar neutrinos primarily teaching us about neutrino oscillations, reactor antineutrino experiments have now pinned down oscillation parameters so precisely that solar neutrino data can finally be used to probe the Sun's interior physics directly, flipping the relationship.

📎 Sources

  1. Falcon 9 Block 5 | USSF-259 — Launch Library 2
  2. Long March 12 | Unknown Payload — Launch Library 2
  3. Electron | Owl By The Dozen (StriX Launch 12) — Launch Library 2
  4. Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 15-27 — Launch Library 2
  5. Kinetica 1 | Unknown Payload — Launch Library 2
  6. Starship | Starlink Group 31-1 (Starship Flight 14) — Launch Library 2
  7. Vulcan VC6L | Amazon Leo (LV-01) — Launch Library 2
  8. Long March 8A | Unknown Payload — Launch Library 2
  9. Long March 12A | Flight 2 — Launch Library 2
  10. Soyuz 2.1b/Fregat | Kosmos (Unknown Payload) — Launch Library 2

Curated from official sources — NASA/ESA/JAXA/ESO/NOAA/arXiv/Launch Library. Informational only.
Serial 20260917-22-v84 · 2026-09-17 22:01 UTC · pulse.uzylab.com

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