Space Debris

For astronomers, it’s a magical moment: you’re staring at a monitor, and a blurry image of a cosmological object sharpens up, revealing new details. We call this “closing the loop,” a reference to the adaptive optics loop, a tool that enables telescopes to correct for haziness caused by turbulence in…

Home News Long exposure star trail image taken at Hehuan Mountain, Taiwan. (Image credit: Shutterstock) The night sky is becoming increasingly filled with shiny satellites and space junk that pose a significant threat to our view of the cosmos, as well as astronomical research, a new study warns. The researchers…

Home News Tech (Image credit: ESA) This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Steven Freeland, Professorial Fellow, Bond University / Emeritus Professor of International Law, Western Sydney University, Western Sydney University Annie Handmer, PhD candidate, School of History and Philosophy…

Companies and governments around the world are racing to figure out how to clean up human-made junk that is cluttering space. Why it matters: Trackers are seeing more and more close calls between satellites, as companies work to deploy constellations of hundreds to thousands of small spacecraft, adding to fears…

Home News Spaceflight The astronauts of SpaceX's Crew-2 mission for NASA had a brief moment of suspense after their spectacular launch on Friday (April 23) when a piece of space debris passed unexpectedly close by their Crew Dragon capsule.  The space junk encounter, called a conjunction, occurred at 1:43 p.m.…

Late last month, a pair of satellites operated by Starlink and OneWeb—two companies working to launch constellations of small, low-orbiting satellites that beam internet access all over Earth—almost collided, passing within nearly 200 feet of one another. As The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, this was only the latest…

A Space Age “tragedy of the commons” is unfolding right under our nose—or, really, right over our head—and no consensus yet exists on how to stop it. For more than a half-century, humans have been hurling objects into low-Earth orbit in ever growing numbers. And with few meaningful limitations on…

A UK -LED mission to show how space debris can be cleared has blasted off. According to the European Space Agency, there is approximately 9,200 tonnes of human space debris littering the solar system. That includes 34,000 objects greater than 10cm and 128 million objects between 1mm and 1cm long.…

The ELSA-d mission’s servicer and chaser satellites (bottom and top) during ground testing last year. Credit: AstroscaleA commercial mission developed by the Japanese company Astroscale rocketed into space on a Russian Soyuz launcher Monday with 37 other payloads, ready to kick off an orbital “dance” with two small spacecraft demonstrating…

When a bizarre, speedy object cruised through our solar system back in 2017 it seemed that everyone in the astronomy world took notice. It was quickly discovered that the object, dubbed Oumuamua, had come from outside of our own solar system, making it the first interstellar object ever detected by…