Space Junk Just Crashed Into the Far Side of the Moon at 5,800 MPH
Observers have been tracking a chunk of space junk, waiting for it to strike the Moon. It should’ve hit the far side of the Moon,…
Observers have been tracking a chunk of space junk, waiting for it to strike the Moon. It should’ve hit the far side of the Moon,…
The accidental experiment will shed light on the physics of impacts in space. On March 4, 2022, a lonely, spent rocket booster will smack into…
ESA’s Izaña-1 laser ranging station in Tenerife, Spain, has recently undergone months of testing and commissioning, passing its final tests with flying colors. As it…
Last month, astronomers reported that a discarded upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, launched 7 years ago, was on a collision course with the…
Update as of February 15: Additional analysis by, among others, citizen-scientist Bill Gray and colleagues at NASA’s JPL, now indicates that the object expected to impact the…
Piyush Mehta, a professor at West Virginia University, predicts the space economy will reach a trillion dollars by 2030 but highlights the challenges posed by…
At 1:58 a.m. CST, 2:58 a.m. EST this morning (December 3, 2021), the Russian Progress 79, attached to the space station, fired its thrusters for…
The evening of Monday, November 29, NASA received a debris notification for the International Space Station. Due to the lack of opportunity to properly assess…
On November 15, 2021, U.S. officials announced that they had detected a dangerous new debris field in orbit near Earth. Later in the day, it…
The chance that ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft will encounter space debris during its upcoming Earth flyby is very, very low. However, the risk is not…
NASA and U.S. Space Command continue to monitor the debris cloud created by a recent Russian anti-satellite test. The International Space Station and crew members…
It might be counter-intuitive, but designing satellites to better fall apart is one of the key strategies to combat space debris. Developed by ESA’s Clean Space…
University of Warwick convenes researchers to investigate challenges of monitoring objects in Earth orbit in new Center for Space Domain Awareness Research into the sustainable…
Thousands of images of Earth and space have been taken by a compact space imaging payload developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers and…
Simulating the burn-up during atmospheric reentry of one of the bulkiest items aboard a typical satellite using a plasma wind tunnel. This Solar Array Drive…
The launch of Sputnik, humankind’s first satellite, in 1957 marked the dawn of a new era for the people of the ‘Pale Blue Dot’. Decades…
More than 27,000 pieces of orbital debris, or “space junk,” are tracked by the Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sensors. Much more…
On May 8, 2021, a piece of space junk from a Chinese rocket fell uncontrolled back to Earth and landed in the Indian Ocean near…