Orbit Daily — 14 September 2026

ESA

ESA’s FLEX mission reveals the secret glow of plants

Video: 00:06:30 Plants may look still and silent, but every leaf is constantly responding to its environment.As plants photosynthesise, they emit an incredibly faint glow called fluorescence. Invisible to our eyes, this signal can reveal how plants are using sunlight and how they respond to heat, drought, pests and other environmental stresses.ESA’s Fluorescence Explorer, or FLEX, will detect this faint signal from space. Using its highly sensitive FLORIS instrument, FLEX will map plant fluorescence across Earth, giving scientists a new way to observe plant health and photosynthetic activity o

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Spaceflight Now

SpaceX launches 700th Falcon rocket, carries final 3 O3b mPOWER satellites to orbit for SES

The launch marks the 400th orbital flight from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Liftoff is scheduled during an 87-minute window that opens at 2:49 p.m. EDT (1849 UTC).

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Universe Today

Could the Clues to Ancient Alien Civilizations Be Hiding in a Bucket of Moon Dust?

Most of our experience with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been focused on capturing radio signals that alien species have sent out, whether intentionally or unintentionally. That creates a huge “synchronicity” problem - what if there aren’t any alien civilizations broadcasting radio signals now, but there were a billion years ago? The Milky Way is around 13 billion years old - hoping that we exist at the same time as an alien civilization that happens to be actively messaging is a huge leap of faith. But, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv and su

RSS briefing from Universe Today · Read the original article ↗

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