Crew-12 splashes down 15:34 UTC today; Nuri flies 15 satellites; Artemis II data goes public

Artemis II lunar science data — more than 800 gigabytes of imagery, audio and crew annotations from April's lunar flyby, now loaded onto NASA's Planetary Data System along with three reports on how the science plan was flown. NASA calls it the first planetary science dataset gathered mainly by people in more than half a century. After a year of schedule talk, this is the part of Artemis II you can open and look at yourself; it includes over 11,000 full-resolution images and 8.5 hours of the crew describing what they saw. NASA

LISA — the ESA-led observatory for ripples in spacetime, three spacecraft flying 2.5 million kilometres apart from about 2035, is held up by Ars Technica as the NASA-Europe deal that survives the agency's new insistence on meaningful contributions. Europe builds, launches and operates; NASA supplies laser transmitters and telescopes for roughly a third of the cost and gets all the data. Worth watching because the White House has twice proposed zeroing NASA's share; ESA approved the mission in 2024 at 1.75 billion euros. Ars Technica

“We’re getting all of the science data, 100 percent of it. That is very good leverage. We are giving them (ESA) this flagship.”

Xona Space Systems — has regulatory approval in hand and six Pulsar satellites finished, due to fly on SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 rideshare this month with operations starting in early 2027. A privately built alternative to GPS putting real flight hardware up is a launch worth marking, and the company is already tooling for the constellation behind it: a Waymo operations veteran hired as chief operating officer, four more satellites in build about 10% lighter, and 35,000 square feet added in Montreal. Payload

“With a product like a navigation service, you can’t scale at the expense of performance or operational resilience.”

SD-1Sat — a 3U cubesat from Korean startup Space & Bean, was one of 15 satellites on Wednesday's flight: five KAIST NEONSATs for a planned ten-satellite Earth observation constellation, plus ten cubesats from Korean companies, universities and institutes. It is testing whether a protective enclosure lets cheap off-the-shelf electronics survive radiation and thermal cycling instead of space-rated parts. It also carries ArbaLabs' ArbaEdge module, which checks the satellite's onboard AI behaved and downlinks at most two megabytes of evidence. Payload