Vol 45, Week 32

NASA & NEWSPACE

• NASA and Northrop Grumman are repurposing Gateway HALO technologies into three Lunar Infrastructure Demo (LID) missions to tackle extreme temperature swings at the lunar South Pole.
• SpaceX stock has fallen significantly from its post-IPO peak above $200, though the company’s 2026 second-quarter revenue hit $7.8 billion.
• Intuitive Machines completes Goonhilly and COMSAT acquisition, becoming first company to own full lunar mission chain: spacecraft manufacturing + lunar landers + Earth-based antennas.

GLOBAL REPORTS

• South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter captured the first-ever pictures of the Falcon 9 upper stage crash site after it struck the Moon on August 5, NASA’s LRO to image site on Aug 12.
• ISRO successfully completed its second Gaganyaan air drop test, verifying the capsule’s parachute system ahead of its first planned uncrewed Gaganyaan-1 orbital test flight late 2026 / early 2027.
• ESA is offering developers the opportunity to run their software on the HERA spacecraft in 2027 while it orbits Didymos and Dimorphos binary asteroid system.
• China is creating a planetary protection lab in its Anhui Province to handle Mars sample returns, the first of which is planned launch in 2028 and return in 2031. 

BEYOND EARTH

• Maui’s Inouye Telescope imaged the Sun in the greatest detail yet, revealing small-scale swirls on its surface (the photosphere) and confirming Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI) phenomena. 
• A new study indicates that Jupiter’s radiation may induce composition-dependent glows in salty ice, offering a potential method to map Europa’s surface chemistry.
• Scientists have confirmed that a mysterious Milky Way object, LHAASO J1912+1014u, is a natural cosmic accelerator blasting out protons at energies roughly 100 times higher than Earth’s Large Hadron Collider.