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Space

🚀 Space Pulse · 2026-09-30 22:01 UTC

SPACE PULSE

Wednesday, 30 September 2026 | 22:00 UTC

⚡ TL;DR

NASA's SpaceX Crew-13 — carrying astronauts Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, and a CSA crewmate — stands vertical at Cape Canaveral SLC-40, targeting liftoff tomorrow, 1 October at 15:10 UTC. [1] [2] [3]

A busy stretch ahead: solar radio bursts fired today, JAXA's Mars moon sample-return mission clears its "Go for Launch" review, and JWST keeps rewriting early-universe chemistry.

🚀 LAUNCHES

IMMINENT - CREW-13 TO ISS

  • SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying NASA's Crew Dragon Crew-13 is scheduled to lift off from SLC-40, Cape Canaveral on 1 October 2026 at 15:10 UTC. [1] [2]
  • The crew includes NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney plus a CSA astronaut; the vehicle was photographed vertical at the pad on 27 September. [3]

THIS MONTH - JAXA MMX

  • JAXA's Martian Moon eXplorer (MMX) is "Go for Launch" aboard a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H3-24 rocket, targeting 19 October 2026 at 19:41 UTC. [4]
  • MMX will land on Phobos, collect surface samples, and return them to Earth; it also carries a French-German rover to explore the moon's surface. [4]

UPCOMING - SOUTH KOREAN EARTH OBSERVATION

  • Korea Aerospace Research Institute's Nuri rocket will loft NeonSat-2 through 6, five Earth observation micro-satellites, on 7 October 2026 at 03:23 UTC. [5]
  • NeonSat is South Korea's first government-led new-space Earth observation constellation. [5]

UPCOMING - CHINESE LAUNCH

  • A Long March 12 rocket with an undisclosed payload is "Go for Launch" from China, targeting 9 October 2026 at 19:25 UTC. [6]

UPCOMING - STARLINK EXPANSION

  • SpaceX Falcon 9 will deploy 27 Starlink Group 15-25 broadband satellites on 10 October 2026 at 16:00 UTC. [7]

LATER IN OCTOBER

  • SpaceX Falcon 9 will carry the 35th Commercial Resupply Services mission, Dragon CRS-2 SpX-35, to the ISS under NASA's CRS-2 contract; date is To Be Determined in October. [8]
  • ULA Vulcan VC6L and Arianespace Ariane 64 Block 2 are both slated to launch batches of Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper) broadband LEO satellites in October, dates TBD. [9] [10]
  • SpaceX Falcon 9 will fly the Bandwagon 5 dedicated mid-inclination rideshare with dozens of small satellites, also TBD in October.

SOUNDING ROCKET

  • HyImpulse's SR75 sounding rocket is targeting its second test flight around 5 October 2026, date To Be Determined.

NASA INFRASTRUCTURE

  • NASA has formally added Blue Origin's New Glenn 9x4 to the NASA Launch Services II contract, making the heavy-lift vehicle available for future agency missions.

🔭 DISCOVERIES

LYMAN-ALPHA FOREST IN AN EPOCH-OF-REIONIZATION GALAXY

  • Researchers report detection of the Lyman-alpha forest in a star-forming galaxy at redshift z approximately 7.57, meaning ultraviolet light from that galaxy has passed through partly neutral hydrogen pockets in the early universe.
  • The finding carries direct implications for pinning down the timing and topology of cosmic reionization — when and how the first stars re-ionized the universe's hydrogen.

JWST MAPS CARBON, NITROGEN, OXYGEN AT COSMIC DAWN

  • Ultra-deep JWST/NIRSpec R~1000 spectroscopy of nine star-forming galaxies at z = 6.0 to 8.3, from the OMEGA survey in the GOODS-N field, yields precise C-N-O abundance measurements for individual early galaxies.
  • These are among the first direct element-by-element chemical portraits of galaxies in the universe's first billion years.

JWST REVEALS DUST-OBSCURED SUPERNOVA TIED TO A GAMMA-RAY BURST

  • JWST observations of GRB 240825A at redshift z = 0.659 uncover a dust-obscured supernova associated with the burst, helping confirm the progenitor identity in a case where prompt-emission duration alone was ambiguous.

TRAPPIST-1c ATMOSPHERE SEARCH WITH JWST

  • Four JWST/NIRSpec PRISM transits of TRAPPIST-1c are analyzed using a new framework that simultaneously fits stellar contamination from the M-dwarf host using per-epoch Gaussian processes.
  • The study finds rocky exoplanet transmission spectroscopy is limited by stellar contamination rather than photon noise, a key calibration result for future habitability studies.

SUPERFLARE RADIO BURST DETECTED ON EQ PEG

  • Combining FAST radio telescope and TESS photometry, astronomers detected finely structured decimetric radio bursts during a superflare on the active M-dwarf binary EQ Peg.
  • The result sheds light on superflare physics on magnetically active stars and the potential impact on nearby exoplanet habitability.

SPHEREx FULL-SKY PAH MAP

  • NASA's SPHEREx mission has produced a full-sky map of integrated 3.3 and 3.4 micron emission from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), tracing the interstellar radiation field and small carbonaceous grains across the entire sky.

ESA/CHINA SMILE MISSION BEGINS SCIENCE

  • ESA's Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (Smile), a joint European-Chinese mission, was declared ready for science on 23 September 2026 after completing in-orbit commissioning; it launched 19 May and reached its target orbit before that date.
  • Smile will study how Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere respond to the solar wind's charged-particle stream.

JAXA GOSAT-GW SENSOR NOW OPERATIONAL

  • Japan's Meteorological Agency has begun operational use of data from AMSR3, the microwave sensor aboard JAXA's IBUKI GW (GOSAT-GW) greenhouse gas satellite launched in June 2025.

LHS 3844 b SURFACE COMPOSITION REFINED

  • New mid-infrared thermal emission spectroscopy tightens constraints on the surface composition of the rocky exoplanet LHS 3844 b, confirming it hosts little to no atmosphere and revealing geological surface signatures.

🛰️ MISSIONS

CREW-13 READY

  • The Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon for NASA's SpaceX Crew-13 mission are vertical and ready at SLC-40, Cape Canaveral, ahead of the 1 October 15:10 UTC launch. [3] [2]

ISS IMAGERY

  • NASA astronaut Anil Menon captured a long-exposure star-trails photograph from the ISS on 20 September 2026, showing the station orbiting 258 miles above the Banda Sea with fishing boats and Indonesian cities visible below.

NASA IAC PRESENCE

  • NASA will highlight Artemis Moon/Mars exploration and the Artemis Accords at the 77th International Astronautical Congress in Antalya, Türkiye, from 5 to 9 October 2026.

ARTEMIS LUNAR COMMS CHALLENGE

  • NASA has opened the 2027 Human Lander Challenge, seeking university student proposals for reliable lunar surface communications to support long-duration Artemis and Moon Base operations.

NASA MOON MANUFACTURING MATERIAL

  • NASA Glenn Research Center has developed a new in-situ manufacturing material — photographed with a microscope showing kaleidoscopic crystal structure — intended to be produced directly on the Moon or Mars during future missions.

ORBITAL SAFETY CONTRACT

  • NASA has awarded Omitron Inc. a five-year indefinite-delivery contract worth approximately 23.5 million dollars for orbital safety analysis services protecting NASA assets and crew.

☀️ SPACE WEATHER

HIGH-ENERGY ELECTRON ALERT ACTIVE TODAY

  • NOAA/GOES-19 issued an ALTEF3 alert at 10:04 UTC on 30 September after the 2 MeV integral electron flux exceeded 1,000 pfu at 09:45 UTC; yesterday's maximum reached 5,622 pfu at 16:20 UTC on 29 September.
  • Elevated relativistic electron flux poses charging risks to satellites in geostationary and high-inclination orbits.

SOLAR RADIO BURSTS DETECTED EARLY TODAY

  • NOAA recorded a Type II radio emission beginning at 02:52 UTC on 30 September with an estimated coronal mass ejection shock velocity of 523 km/s, observed by the Palehua station.
  • A Type IV radio emission followed immediately at 02:56 UTC on 30 September, consistent with a magnetically trapped energetic particle population from the same solar event.
  • Together, the Type II and Type IV signatures indicate a significant solar eruption earlier today; a CME arrival assessment should be monitored in the coming 1 to 3 days.

EARLIER G1 WATCH NOW PASSED

  • A G1 (Minor) geomagnetic storm watch was issued on 21 September for a predicted disturbance on 24 September; that event has now passed without escalation.

📄 RESEARCH

FRB PERSISTENT RADIO SOURCE TRILOGY

  • Three companion arXiv papers (uGMRT 1.26 GHz survey of 24 FRBs, a tentative faint persistent radio source near FRB 20181030A, and a luminosity-rotation measure correlation for FRB-PRS pairs) together build the strongest statistical case yet that some fast radio burst sources are magnetars wrapped in highly magnetized, baryon-loaded nebulae.

COMMON ENVELOPE EVOLUTION IS FUNDAMENTALLY CHAOTIC

  • A new theoretical argument shows that when a giant star engulfs a companion in a common envelope event, the outcome is so sensitive to small initial differences that predicting the result for any individual binary system is effectively impossible — with direct consequences for models of black hole and neutron star mergers.

TRAPPIST-1c AND THE STELLAR CONTAMINATION PROBLEM

  • A dedicated calibration framework using JWST NIRSpec PRISM data across four transit epochs of TRAPPIST-1c demonstrates that time-varying stellar spots and faculae on the M-dwarf host dominate the spectral noise budget, not photon statistics — a roadmap for all future rocky-planet atmosphere searches around red dwarfs.

LISA BRIGHT SIRENS AS A HUBBLE TENSION TIEBREAKER

  • A new paper shows that gravitational waves from massive black hole binaries detectable by the future LISA space observatory, when their host galaxies can be identified, will deliver independent luminosity distances capable of discriminating between competing cosmological models currently in tension over the Hubble constant.

TYPE Ia SUPERNOVA HIGH-VELOCITY FEATURES SURVEYED

  • Analysis of 181 optical spectra of 56 Type Ia supernovae reveals patterns in the high-velocity absorption lines of Ca II and Si II seen in early-time spectra, constraining the physical origin of these features — which are key to understanding explosion geometry and the use of SNe Ia as distance indicators.

SULFUR LOCKED IN SILICATE GRAINS SOLVES A LONG-STANDING MYSTERY

  • Laboratory and theoretical work finds that sulfur undergoes thermally irreversible chemisorption onto silicate dust grains in molecular clouds, offering a compelling explanation for the decades-old "missing sulfur" problem where a large fraction of cosmic sulfur in star-forming regions went unaccounted for.

Space Pulse is compiled from NASA, ESA, JAXA, NOAA SWPC, and arXiv astro-ph only. All times UTC. Next edition: 1 October 2026.

📎 Sources

  1. Falcon 9 Block 5 | Crew-13 — Launch Library 2
  2. NASA Sets Crew-13 Launch, Docking Coverage — NASA News Releases
  3. Crew-13 Rocket and Spacecraft at Launch Pad — NASA News Releases
  4. H3-24 | Martian Moon eXplorer (MMX) — Launch Library 2
  5. Nuri | NeonSat-2 to 6 — Launch Library 2
  6. Long March 12 | Unknown Payload — Launch Library 2
  7. Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 15-25 — Launch Library 2
  8. Falcon 9 Block 5 | Dragon CRS-2 SpX-35 — Launch Library 2
  9. Vulcan VC6L | Amazon Leo (LV-01) — Launch Library 2
  10. Ariane 64 Block 2 | Amazon Leo (LE-04) — Launch Library 2

Curated from official sources — NASA/ESA/JAXA/ESO/NOAA/arXiv/Launch Library. Informational only.
Serial 20260930-22-v96 · 2026-09-30 22:01 UTC · pulse.uzylab.com

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