On Friday, March 8, a pallet of used batteries from the International Space Station (ISS) reentered Earth’s atmosphere over the Gulf of Mexico following an unpredictable journey through orbit.
For more than 45 years, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been cruising through the cosmos, crossing the boundary of our solar system to become the first human-made object to venture to interstellar space.
We’re rapidly approaching the quarter mark of the 21st century, but instead of being at the brink of a radical transformative stage, such as the futuristic vision akin to Arthur C. Clarke’s Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey, we’re still throwing proverbial bones into the sky.
California startup Varda Space released raw footage of its capsule reentering the atmosphere. This mission marked two significant achievements: bringing home the first batch of pharmaceutical crystals manufactured in orbit outside the International Space Station (ISS), and making Varda Space, with help from Rocket…
In a tense moment for space safety, two satellites—NASA’s TIMED spacecraft and the defunct Russian Cosmos 2221—came alarmingly close to smashing into each other above Earth, prompting concerns about the risks of space debris.
After eight years of experimenting with flames in space, NASA lit a fire inside a cargo spacecraft for the last time and sent its Saffire experiment toward a burning reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a reentry license to Varda Space’s manufacturing capsule, allowing the first batch of space drugs to return back to Earth.
An unspecified defect in early model Starlink satellites has prompted SpaceX to preemptively deorbit the units before they potentially fail and become hazards in low Earth orbit. While the company remains confident that the deorbiting of these problematic units will prevent any issues, this incident underscores the…
The 46-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft is on the fritz again, and this time it may be critical. As one engineer said, “this is, by far, the most serious since I’ve been project manager.” Here are our top science stories from this week.
