The Joint Space Operations Center this week added hundreds of new debris objects to their catalog of objects orbiting Earth, originating from five separate debris events, one of which was previously unknown and involved a 50-year old Delta rocket stage.
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NASA’s Earth Observing-1 mission came to an end this week after over sixteen years of operations, capturing 92,000 images of Earth and further science’s understanding of an ever-changing planet.
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The U.S. Air Force X-37B OTV-4 spacecraft on Saturday surpassed the record for the longest flight duration of any mission in the clandestine program, marking 675 days in orbit for the small winged space plane on its current mission reportedly dedicated to a series of technical demonstrations and space experiments.
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Lockheed Martin announced this week that the SBIRS GEO-3 missile warning satellite has reached Geostationary Orbit and delivered its first light images, the first step in a multi-month commissioning campaign to ready the satellite for operation.
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Five small CubeSats were deployed from the International Space Station on Monday via NanoRacks’ commercial deployment mechanism that allows ISS to serve as an orbital launch pad for educational and commercial satellite missions of short duration.
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The Dragon SpX-10 cargo spacecraft aborted its rendezvous with the International Space Station on Wednesday after encountering a problem with the Relative GPS navigation feature used by the approaching craft during the far-field rendezvous phase.
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The enigmatic X-37B space plane operated by the U.S. Air Force continues to puzzle program observers as information was put forward by the Pentagon on Tuesday of no plans of an imminent landing of the winged spacecraft
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The ominous X-37B space plane operated in semi-secrecy by the U.S. Air Force may be approaching the end of its fourth mission, indicated by a move to a lower orbit earlier this month that has been a sure sign of an imminent landing on the craft’s first three missions.
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Teams at the European Space Agency were scrambling this week to move one of the agency’s Swarm magnetospheric research satellites out of the way of a piece of orbiting debris.
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China’s Quantum Science Satellite was declared operational this week after five months of in-orbit testing, now set for a busy two-year mission demonstrating hack-proof communications by means of entangled photons as a trailblazer for what is widely considered the communications technology of the future.
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The European Space Agency is studying a potentially serious problem with the atomic clocks that drive Europe’s Galileo Navigation Satellites and have shown an alarming failure rate across the early phase of the satellite constellation.
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A group of six small satellites from Japan, Singapore and Italy was released from the International Space Station on Monday to begin a variety of technical demonstration missions with particular focus on orbital debris removal and re-entry systems.
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Two satellites will come dangerously close to one another Saturday night and a collision can not be ruled out according to a warning issued by the Joint Space Operations Center that monitors all sizeable objects orbiting the Earth.
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A small satellite was deployed from the International Space Station Monday morning for a technical demonstration of a tether extending system using a mother and daughter satellite.
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Europe’s Galileo Global Navigation Satellite System officially opened for business on Thursday in its Initial Operational Capability – delivering global positioning, navigation and timing information to a wide user base.
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China’s Shijian-17 satellite this week linked up with another satellite in Geostationary Orbit and has entered a path closely shadowing the resident object in continued testing of rendezvous and situational awareness technology in the high-orbit regime.
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Unique photos captured last week’s Ariane 5 launch with a quadruplet of Galileo navigation satellites but observers also had eyes high in the sky to capture equally tantalizing views of the four satellites arriving at their orbit destination nearly 23,000 Kilometers above the Earth.
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