February 2nd, 2026
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Yet another “close call/near miss” in Earth orbit. On Christmas Day 2025, a European non-operational payload (SPOT 3) passed within roughly 65 feet (20 meters) of a fragment from a Soviet payload that exploded in 1996. “This conjunction involved two objects left in orbit last century,” said Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow for LeoLabs […]
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The countdown for the Artemis II wet dress rehearsal is underway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The countdown clock began January 31 at 8:13 p.m. EST, or L-48 hours, 40 minutes before the opening of a simulated launch window at 9 pm. Mon, Feb. 2. The test is expected to go […]
Mars Guy details how driving a rover on Mars requires humans on Earth to plan the route. “Self-driving cars on Earth can take advantage of GPS to navigate,” Mars Guy points out, “but Mars has no global positioning system, so rover drivers have to set waypoints manually.” AI navigation Now Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been […]
SpaceX has announced a Space Situational Awareness system called Stargaze. The space-based Stargaze system uses data collected from nearly 30,000 in orbit star trackers mounted on Starlink satellites. The safety and sustainability of satellite operations in low Earth orbit (LEO) will benefit by Stargaze operations, the company explains, and its screening data will be made available to the broader satellite […]
China has announced its intention to send its Xihe-2 probe to the Sun-Earth L5 point between 2028 and 2029. Xihe-2 would carry out three-dimensional observations of the sun from entirely new wavelengths and perspectives, explains Fang Cheng of the School of Astronomy and Space Science at Nanjing University. The probe would maintain orbital stability without […]
NASA appears to be continuing its re-contacting efforts with the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN). The agency’s Deep Space Network (DSN) is continuing recovery activities after losing contact with the Mars orbiter on December 6. A posting last month noted that, although no spacecraft telemetry has been received since Dec. 4, a brief fragment […]
The European Space Agency has green-lighted a very complex reentry of a specially designed spacecraft. They are building a sensor-loaded satellite specifically built to dive into the Earth’s atmosphere. As a headfirst, artificial “fall guy” shooting through first thin and then thicker air, it would collect data on how materials react and introduce pollutants into […]
The Amazon low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation — formerly named Project Kuiper – is a worrisome initiative, particularly for astronomers, given that 3,232 satellites are planned to orbit the Earth. The state-of-the-art satellite technology is to deliver reliable, high-speed connectivity. The Amazon mega-constellation will potentially impact astronomical research and aesthetic appreciation of the night sky, […]
Reentering space clutter and its influence on Earth’s stratosphere continues to draw research attention. “We’re really changing the composition of the stratosphere into a state that we’ve never seen before,” said John Dykema, an applied physicist at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), who warns that scientists today poorly understand many of the […]
A team of astronomers have used a new AI-assisted method to search for rare astronomical objects in the Hubble Legacy Archive. The team sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts in just two and a half days, uncovering nearly 1400 anomalous objects, more than 800 of which had never been documented before. Image credit: ESA/Hubble […]
