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Our planet is surrounded by spacecraft helping us study our changing climate, save lives following disasters, deliver global communication and navigation services and help us answer important scientific questions.

But these satellites are at risk. Accidental collisions between objects in space can produce huge clouds of fast-moving debris that can spread and damage additional satellites with cascading effect.

In this animation, find out how teams at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, take action to keep satellites safe after receiving an alert warning of a possible collision between an active satellite and a piece of

André Kuipers is one of a handful of astronauts who has had to 'shelter-in-place' from a piece of marauding space debris.

Albuquerque NM (SPX) Apr 21, 2021
SolAero Technologies, a leading provider of high efficiency solar cells composite structural products for satellite and aerospace applications, congratulates the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL) on the successful maiden flight of the Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity. SolAero is proud to have supplied the solar panel that has enabled the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.

San Antonio TX (SPX) Apr 21, 2021
On Jan. 9, 2020, NASA's Lucy mission officially announced that it would be visiting not seven, but eight asteroids. As it turns out, Eurybates, one of the asteroids along Lucy's path, has a small satellite. Though searching for satellites is one of the mission's central goals, finding these tiny worlds before Lucy is launched gives the team the opportunity to investigate their orbits and p

New York NY (SPX) Apr 21, 2021
On April 21, 1908, near Earth's North Pole, the Arctic explorer Frederick Albert Cook scrawled in his diary a memorable phrase: "We were the only pulsating creatures in a dead world of ice." These words may soon take on new significance for humankind in another dead world of hidden ice, submerged beneath the red sand of its frigid deserts. This dead world is Mars, and the desert is the planet's

Bethesda, MD (SPX) Apr 21, 2021
Many recent articles have expressed concern about the growing amount of junk floating around Earth in low orbits. Ultimately, the mass and distribution of junk and active satellites will exceed the capacity of space to safely contain the debris generated by the addition of more than an estimated 50,000 new satellites planned for deployment in the next few years. If and when this limit is reached

Beijing (Sputnik) Apr 21, 2021
China now has 400 satellites in orbit, second only in number to the United States and it is projected to have at least one thousand of them deployed by the end of this decade, Space Command chief Army General James Dickinson said in congressional testimony on Tuesday. "Back in 2010 they had 70 satellites in orbit: Today they have 400," Dickinson told the US Senate Armed Services Committee.

Toulouse, France (SPX) Apr 22, 2021
Airbus has passed an important milestone for the OneSat flexible satellite product line, with the Final Design Review successfully achieved with customers and space agencies. The fully reconfigurable OneSat product line features major innovations and disruptive technologies including the latest digital processing and active antennas enabling several thousand beams. In addition, to meet the

Perth, Australia (SPX) Apr 22, 2021
Astronomers have discovered a pulsar - a dense and rapidly spinning neutron star sending radio waves into the cosmos - using a low-frequency radio telescope in outback Australia. The pulsar was detected with the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope, in Western Australia's remote Mid West region. It's the first time scientists have discovered a pulsar with the MWA but they believ

Washington DC (SPX) Apr 22, 2021
A team of astronomers including Carnegie's Alycia Weinberger and former-Carnegie postdoc Meredith MacGregor, now an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, spotted an extreme outburst, or flare, from the Sun's nearest neighbor - the star Proxima Centauri. Their work, which could help guide the search for life beyond our Solar System, is published in The Astrophysical Jou