Space Debris

Outer space is incomprehensibly vast and empty. Yet over the past century, humans have managed to clutter a region known as low Earth orbit (LEO), which stretches from 125 to 1,200 miles above the surface of the planet, with "space debris." This broad category of man-made objects includes "dead" satellites,…

The International Space Station is going to have to dodge out of the way of a piece of space junk that's expected to pass within just 600 meters of it, Russia's space agency Roscosmos has said. The debris fragment will fly close to the manned orbiting laboratory on November 12…

NASA space debris expert Dr Don Kessler was the first to observe that once the amount of space debris reaches a critical point, unavoidable collisions will cause more debris, in a disastrous chain reaction that will make space inaccessible to us. This has been termed the Kessler Syndrome. Once the…

by Andrew Jones — November 5, 2021 Shijian-21 lifting off atop a Long March 3B from Xichang at 9:27 a.m. local time, October 24. Credit: CASC HELSINKI — U.S. space tracking has detected a new object orbiting along with China’s recently launched Shijian-21 space debris mitigation technology satellite. Shijian-21 was…

The space around our planet is increasingly filling up with junk, from pieces of broken satellites to discarded rocket stages. This debris threatens space exploration and research, from the International Space Station to the Hubble Space Telescope, and we still don’t have a good plan on how to clear it…

Almost above 27,000 pieces of space junk- bigger than the size of a softball- currently orbiting Earth. Cleaning up this space junk is an essential task to send more rockets to space. Now, mechanical engineers at the University of Utah have discovered a method of manipulating orbiting space debris. The…

Enlarge / Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth aside from the Sun. Modern human society has been making it ever more challenging for astronomers to get their job done. While we've designated radio-quiet areas and dark skies initiatives, tensions have been heightened recently by the launch of broadband-Internet satellites,…

A Long March 3B rocket lifts off with China’s Shijian 21 satellite. Credit: CASC China launched the classified Shijian 21 satellite Saturday on what government officials described as an experimental “space debris mitigation” mission. The Shijian 21 satellite lifted off aboard a Long March 3B rocket at 9:27 p.m. EDT…

by Andrew Jones — October 24, 2021 Shijian-21 lifting off atop a Long March 3B from Xichang at 9:27 a.m. local time, October 24. Credit: CASC HELSINKI — China launched the Shijian-21 satellite from Xichang late Saturday with the stated aim of testing space debris mitigation technologies. A Long March…

China successfully launched a new satellite on Sunday to test and verify space debris mitigation technologies. It was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in southwest China's Sichuan Province. The satellite, named Shijian-21, was launched by a Long March-3B carrier rocket and it entered the planned orbit successfully. The…