SpaceX expanded its constellation of low Earth orbit satellites on Saturday with the launch of 53 Starlink satellites from Florida.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 7:19 a.m. EST and deployed the satellites about 16 minutes after launch.

A space object with an intimidating name—"earthgrazer"—zoomed over Georgia and Alabama this week, offering witnesses a glimpse of something rare, NASA says.

"Earthgrazers" are fireball meteors with a trajectory so shallow that they skim long distances across the upper atmosphere, NASA says.

"Very rarely, they even 'bounce off' the atmosphere and head back out into space," NASA Meteor Watch wrote on Facebook.

The fireball appeared Tuesday, Nov. 9, around 6:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, officials say, and was "detected by three NASA meteor cameras in the region."

It entered the atmosphere "at a very shallow angle—only 5 degrees from the horizontal."

In fact, it was flying for so long that NASA had to recalculate its data to determine how far it traveled across the planet.

"The meteor was first seen at an altitude of 55 miles above the Georgia town of Taylorsville, moving northwest at 38,500 miles per hour," NASA says. Taylorsville is about 55 miles northwest of downtown Atlanta.

"Its path was so long that our automated software could not handle all the data. So we ran another analysis code this morning (Nov.

Earlier this week, the International Space Station (ISS) was forced to maneouvre out of the way of a potential collision with space junk. With a crew of astronauts and cosmonauts on board, this required an urgent change of orbit on November 11.

Over the station's 23-year orbital lifetime, there have been about 30 close encounters with orbital debris requiring evasive action. Three of these near-misses occurred in 2020. In May this year there was a hit: a tiny piece of space junk punched a 5mm hole in the ISS's Canadian-built robot arm.

This week's incident involved a piece of debris from the defunct Fengyun-1C weather satellite, destroyed in 2007 by a Chinese anti-satellite missile test. The satellite exploded into more than 3,500 pieces of debris, most of which are still orbiting. Many have now fallen into the ISS's orbital region.

To avoid the collision, a Russian Progress supply spacecraft docked to the station fired its rockets for just over six minutes. This changed the ISS's speed by 0.7 meters per second and raised its orbit, already more than 400km high, by about 1.2km.

Seven months after it was launched, the US robotic rover Perseverance successfully landed on Mars on February 18 2021. The landing was part of the mission Mars2020 and was viewed live by millions of people worldwide, reflecting the renewed global interest in space exploration. It was soon followed by China's Tianwen-1, an interplanetary Mars mission consisting of an orbiter, lander and rover called Zhourong.

Perseverance and Zhourong were the fifth and sixth planetary rovers deployed in the last decade. The first one was America's Curiosity which landed on Mars in 2012, followed by China's three Chang'E missions.

In 2019 the Chang'E-4 lander and its Yutu-2 rover were the first human objects landed on the far side of the moon—the side that faces away from the Earth. This marked a pivotal milestone in planetary exploration, of equal importance to the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, when the far side of the moon was seen by humans for the first time.

To analyze the data captured from the Yutu-2 rover, which used ground-penetrating radar (GPR), we developed a tool that could detect in much greater detail the layers beneath the moon's surface than had ever been done before.

A new rocket designed to launch humans to the moon, Mars and beyond will launch next year from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. On board, will be a familiar fuzzy figure—Snoopy.

A 5-ounce plush toy version of the daydreaming beagle—wearing a space suit designed according to NASA's strict specifications—has an important job for the Artemis I unmanned mission.

NASA uses stuffed animals on flights because when the little guys start to float, it indicates that the spacecraft has entered space's zero gravity. Since the toys are soft and light, they won't break anything or accidentally strike a button.

The Artemis I mission is scheduled to circle the moon and then return to Earth in February as a dry run without astronauts, making sure all systems are working for future crewed missions. Also aboard will be two Lego figurines, part of an educational series.