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inadvertently set into motion by a Historic! all-female space walk crew. It is currently following a trajectory that precedes the International Space Station (ISS) by two to four minutes and is bright enough to be seen with only the aid of a pair of ordinary binoculars. NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara are currently on a science mission, living and working aboard the ISS microgravity laboratory. On Wednesday, Nov. 1, the pair completed an impressive 6-hour, 42-minute spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA), during which they made some repairs, failed to make others, and lost a sack of equipment. On...

The SpaceX Dragon capsule was observed breaking apart above the area of Australia where the farmers found the debris. Its re-entry was seen and heard by people from Canberra to Bendigo, with many sharing it on social media. ‘At first it kind of looks like a burnt tree … and then you come up to it, it’s like this alien obelisk almost,’ says astrophysicist Brad Tucker of the space debris that he believes to be from a SpaceX mission. Photograph: Brad TuckerSpaceX has not yet confirmed to Tucker that the debris belonged to SpaceX Dragon, and has not yet responded...

Elon Musk said on Tuesday that SpaceX's Starlink satellites have had to dodge debris from a Russian missile test. Russia blasted one of its satellites with a missile on November 15, causing an explosion of debris that spread throughout Earth's orbit, traveling about 10 times the speed of a bullet. ... ..."If [a satellite] gets hit by one of the bigger pieces of debris... it could completely destroy the satellite into thousands of more pieces," astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who tracks satellites and debris objects, told Insider after the missile test. "You could see debris hitting the satellites, causing more debris...

Earlier this week, the International Space Station (ISS) was forced to maneuver 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...

In March, the U.S. Space Force's 18th Space Control Squadron (18SPCS) reported the breakup of Yunhai 1-02, a Chinese military satellite that launched in September 2019. It was unclear at the time whether the spacecraft had suffered some sort of failure — an explosion in its propulsion system, perhaps — or if it had collided with something in orbit. On Saturday (Aug. 14), McDowell spotted an update in the Space-Track.org catalog, which the 18SPCS makes available to registered users. The update included "a note for object 48078, 1996-051Q: 'Collided with satellite.' This is a new kind of comment entry —...

A piece of space junk smacked into the robotic arm on the International Space Station, but near-term operations should not be affected, according to the agencies involved. Robotic operators noticed a hole in the station's Canadarm2 provided by the Canadian Space Agency, which has been in service in orbit since 2001, during a routine inspection on May 12, the CSA officials said in a blog post Friday (May 28). Officials called the hole a "lucky strike" given the relatively small size of the arm, which is 57.7 feet (17.6 meters) long and has a diameter of just 14 inches (35...

It wasn’t the original plan for the pallet to be discarded like this. The failed launch of a Soyuz rocket in 2018, in which NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin were forced to make an emergency landing in the Kazakh steppe, caused a disruption to the spacewalking schedule, leading to the leftover pallet. NASA’s spacewalk on February 1, 2021, involving astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover, was notable in that it concluded a four-year effort to upgrade the space station’s batteries. These batteries store energy collected by solar arrays, but in 2011 NASA decided to make the...

Was the EO on election fraud all for naught? If the ODNI put a report together verifying foreign interference in our election (and he did), what happened to that?? Does it just swirl down the toilet and no one does anything with it? Is something being done about it? Lindell's documentary further proves huge amounts of fraud. According to Ramsland, thousands of servers accessed our votes. What happened with all the effort that was put in to hold people to account? Are people high up in the military doing their job based on the EO and the DNI report?

A mysterious object temporarily orbiting Earth is a 54-year-old rocket, not an asteroid after all, astronomers confirmed Wednesday. Observations by a telescope in Hawaii clinched its identity, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The object was classified as an asteroid after its discovery in September. But NASA’s top asteroid expert, Paul Chodas, quickly suspected it was the Centaur upper rocket stage from Surveyor 2, a failed 1966 moon-landing mission. Size estimates had put it in the range of the old Centaur, which was about 32 feet (10 meters) long and 10 feet (3 meters) in diameter. Chodas...

The object, dubbed 2020 SO by astronomers, will come within "just" 31,605 miles of our planet at 3:50 a.m. ET on December 1, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS.) This is an "extremely close," albeit safe, approach... The object, which is estimated to measure between 15-33 feet across, was discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey based in Maui, Hawaii, on September 17, 2020. This find was confirmed two days later by the Minor Planet Center, which is responsible for the designation of minor bodies in the solar system. Initial observations suggested that the object was an asteroid....

No, really. It has signed a contract to make this happen in 2025The European Space Agency has formalised its plan to dispose of space junk by using an orbiting claw to grab an old bit of rocket before dragging both the claw and the junk to a fiery doom.The agency announced the plan in late 2019 when it revealed it had asked Swiss startup ClearSpace to fully scope the mission.The paperwork was due in March and found favour with ESA's Ministerial Council, which has approved funding for an €86 million contract to fund the mission.The goal remains the same: fly...

A four-stage Soyuz-2 rocket lifted off from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northwestern Russia early Friday morning, carrying a classified payload that's believed to be the fourth satellite for the country's EKS OiBU missile-warning network, according to RussianSpaceWeb.com. The Soyuz successfully delivered the satellite to its intended orbit, the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced Friday afternoon. The rocket's third stage was expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere over southeastern Australia, with any surviving debris from that part of the booster targeted to splash down in the Pacific Ocean south of Tasmania, RussianSpaceWeb.com reported. Many people in the region, from central Victoria to northern...

Chunks of the massive Chinese rocket that recently took an uncontrolled plunge back into the Earth’s atmosphere narrowly missed hitting New York City, according to a report. Had the Long March 5B rocket re-entered the atmosphere about 15 to 20 minutes earlier on Monday, it would have rained debris on the nation’s largest metro area, according to Ars Technica, a technology-focused publication. The about 100-foot-long rocket was launched on May 5, carrying an unnamed prototype of a newly designed Chinese crew capsule. After about a week in orbit, the 20-ton core stage of the rocket fell back into the atmosphere...

Space junk from a new Chinese rocket narrowly missed dropping down on New York City Monday night, according to a report, largely burning up in the atmosphere before some of the debris survived long enough to slam into West Africa. The doomed core passed right over New York City, Ars reported -- and if re-entry had been just a few minutes earlier, debris could reportedly have showered the Big Apple. Instead, at least part of it fell on a town in Cote d’Ivoire, Quartz reported. McDowell on Twitter said he could “conclude” that the objects that fell on Cote d’Ivoire...

What happens if the retired space telescope and former spy satellite crash into each other? ______________________________________________________________ Leo Labs, a venture-based company that monitors satellites in Low Earth Orbit, tweeted yesterday that it was tracking two satellites that will come within 15 to 30 meters of each other January 29, just before 6:40 p.m. EST. The two satellites are IRAS, a decommissioned NASA space telescope, and GGSE-4, a US Naval Research Lab intelligence satellite. They're set to sweep past each other in the skies above Pittsburgh at an altitude of about 559 miles above Earth's surface. _____________________________________________________________________ LeoLabs, a company that...

A ball of light that blinked into South Florida’s inky predawn sky Wednesday before bursting into pieces with dazzling long-lived tails was a hunk of cosmic scrap metal, one of 25,000 objects the Air Force tracks in space. The flaming debris, part of a Chinese CZ3 rocket body, was forecast to reenter the atmosphere Wednesday morning but no one predicted the delight and awe it would spark in those who saw it lazily fall toward Earth just after 2 a.m. At least two people called the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, one who said there were UFOs over the skies...

Surprise” might be an understatement to describe amateur astronomer Phil Williams’ reaction upon being told that the ghostly radio signal he had detected was, in fact, coming from a satellite that had failed and disappeared decades ago. Williams told Southgate Amateur Radio News that the signal he detected from his base in Cornwall seemed to cycle every four seconds, diminishing and returning to create an eerie repetitive sound. It would later be determined that the fluctuation was the result of the long-lost satellite barreling end over end through the void of space, causing variations in the light reaching the solar...

Luxembourg-based Intelsat reports that its Intelsat 29E satellite (IS-29E) is now a total loss, after having reported earlier that the spacecraft suffered an anomaly. Late on April 7, the Intelsat 29e propulsion system experienced damage that caused a leak of the propellant on board the satellite, resulting in a service disruption to customers.. That event caused a service outage on the Intelsat 29e satellite that affected maritime, aeronautical and wireless-operator customers in the Latin America, Caribbean and North Atlantic regions. While working to recover the satellite, a second anomaly occurred, after which all efforts to recover the satellite were unsuccessful,...

California residents were stunned to watch a fireball of space junk shoot across the sky and fall onto a nearby ranch last week. Videos of the bizarre sight quickly spread across social media — with many wondering what the debris was and where exactly it came from. The owner of the ranch near Hanford spotted the big chunk of metal in his walnut orchard on Oct. 13 and alerted local authorities. ..." After nearly a week of searching for clues, officials finally got an answer. The Vandenberg Air Force Base told Kings County Sheriff's deputies the object was most likely a...

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