NASA
MethaneSAT / Environmental Defense Fund
ESA / ID&Sense / ONiRiXEL, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
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.
Many Star Wars fans probably thought they were dreaming when the European Space Agency published images of what looked like a TIE starfighter in space. Alas, it wasn’t the Empire, but rather glimpses of a decades-old Earth observation satellite making its return home.
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…
After 13 years of slow orbital decay, a legacy satellite will finally be put out of its misery by plunging through Earth’s atmosphere where it will burn up into tiny fragments.
Our mouths and guts are teeming with mysterious somethings that are unknown to science, new research suggests. A team says they’ve discovered distinct virus-like structures hanging out among the bacteria that live in our bodies. The researchers have coined these structures “obelisks,” and they might further redefine…
Earth’s orbit will be monitored by a watchful set of robotic eyes, the first commercial constellation of satellites with the ability to keep track of objects in space to avoid collisions between spacecraft.