space debris
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Chinese Astronauts Performed Emergency Space Station Repairs Following Debris Impact
China’s space station crew carried out two spacewalks this past winter to repair the solar wings attached to the core module, which had been damaged by space debris. The Tiangong space station’s core module, Tianhe, suffered a partial loss of power due to the impact, leading China to dispatch its astronauts on a pair of…
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Pioneering Climate Satellite to Bid Farewell With Fiery Uncontrolled Return to Earth
After 13 years of slow orbital decay, a legacy satellite will finally be put out of its misery by plunging through Earth’s atmosphere where it will burn up into tiny fragments. The second European Remote Sensing satellite, ERS-2, is scheduled for an atmospheric reentry in mid-February, ending a 16-year mission that revolutionized our understanding of…
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Chinese Rocket’s Moon Collision in 2022 Carried Mystery Object, Experts Say
The surface of the Moon is littered with defunct hardware from past missions that are now buried amongst the lunar regolith. A recent crash site left a distinct and curious mark, creating two impact craters of equal size. Scientists examining the collision believe that there may have been an undisclosed object that crashed on the…
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Astronaut Tool Bag Becomes Unexpected Satellite After ISS Spacewalk Slip-Up
In space, misplacing a bag of tools is hard to recover from. A tiny mishap during a recent spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) has led to a new object in the night sky, with a tool bag now orbiting Earth ahead of the space station, temporarily taunting the astronauts who dropped it. During…