Spaceflight doesn’t usually come to mind when thinking of the serene, lush mountains of North Carolina. It’s true that in the early 1960s, NASA built the (now defunct) Rosman Satellite Tracking and Data Acquisition Facility among the rolling hills of Appalachia to track Soviet satellites and relay communications for the Gemini and Apollo programs. And… Read More »
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. A piece of debris launched from the International Space Station unexpectedly survived a fiery re-entry from orbit last month and punctured the roof of a Florida home, according to NASA. When the federal agency disposed… Read More »
Satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) can drift hundreds of kilometers out of their expected orbits when hit by bad space weather. The problem affects the International Space Station, China’s Tiangong space station, and many Earth observation satellites that require close monitoring of our planet. This positioning uncertainty increases the risk of dangerous orbital collisions,… Read More »
Aparna Venkatesan He is an astronomer and dark sky advocate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of San Francisco. John Barentine is an astronomer, historian, author, science communicator and founder of Dark Sky Consulting, LLC. The Moon has been a calendar, ancestor, ritual, inspiration and origin story for humanity since humankind… Read More »
There’s some interesting fallout from the recent dive of the European Remote Sensing satellite, or ERS-2, to Earth. ERS-2 studied our planet for nearly 16 years after its launch in April 1995. Later in 2011 European Space Agency (ESA) decided to end the mission of the radar-carrying spacecraft. The agency commandeered a series of deorbiting… Read More »
Russia launched its Soyuz-2-1v rocket earlier this month. Two prevailing theories suggest developing an ASAT capability that is either nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered In 1962, the USA conducted the largest nuclear test in space. The effects were far more devastating than the Pentagon had imagined and led to a treaty banning the deployment of nuclear weapons… Read More »
SpaceX reported that despite the constellation’s growth, the number of close encounters between its satellites and other orbital objects has not increased over the past six months. Space sustainability experts say the development is good news but warn that the reduction in evasive maneuvers is likely just a deviation from the long-term upward trend. Twice… Read More »