Space Debris

The European Space Agency has formalised its plan to dispose of space junk by using an orbiting claw to grab an old bit of rocket before dragging both the claw and the junk to a fiery doom. The agency announced the plan in late 2019 when it revealed it had…

Nov. 26, 2020Updated: Nov. 26, 2020 7:21 a.m.BERLIN (AP) — The European Space Agency says it is signing a 86 million-euro ($102 million) contract with a Swiss start-up company to bring a large piece of orbital trash back to Earth. The agency said Thursday that the deal with ClearSpace SA will…

Letters Dov GreenbaumZvi Meitar Institute for Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies, IDC Herzliya, Herzliya, Israel; Harry Radzyner Law School, IDC Herzliya, Herzliya, Israel, and Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06510, USA.Email: dov.greenbaum{at}aya.yale.edu See allHide authors and affiliations Science  20 Nov 2020:Vol. 370, Issue 6519,…

Bryan Alexander   | USA TODAY With everything going on here on Earth, we might have forgotten to worry about meteorites plummeting from the sky, or asteroids exploding into the surface.Fortunately there's "Fireball: Visitors from the Dark World," streaming Friday on Apple TV+.Full disclosure, filmmaker Werner Herzog and Cambridge scientist Clive Oppenheimer…

Space is a messy place. An estimated 34,000 pieces of junk over 10 cm in diameter are currently orbiting Earth at around 10 times the speed of a bullet. If one of them hits a spacecraft, the damage could be disastrous. In September, the International Space Station had to dodge an unknown…

IMAGE: This image shows four views of asteroid Bennu along with a corresponding global mosaic. The images were taken on Dec. 2, 2018, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's PolyCam camera, which is... view more  Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona By studying impact marks on the surface of asteroid Bennu - the target of…

File photo of Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer. Credit: NASA/Jay WestcottSpaceX could use its Starship vehicles to clear out space debris in Earth orbit, alongside the program’s more publicized purpose of ferrying people and cargo to the moon and Mars, a company executive said. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s…

A discarded Chinese rocket stage and a Soviet-era satellite nearly collided over Earth overnight. The collision would have created a huge amount of new space debris and made our current space junk problem even worse. As we continue to launch more and more satellites, the potential for space junk to…

The round, led by venture capital firm AStart Co. Ltd., brings the total capital raised to date to US$191 million.Read More

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s new moonshot rules: No fighting and littering. And no trespassing at historic lunar landmarks like Apollo 11′s Tranquility Base.The space agency released a set of guidelines Tuesday for its Artemis moon-landing program, based on the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and other agreements. So far,…