space debris
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ISS Astronauts Forced to Take Shelter After Russian Satellite Mysteriously Disintegrates
Fragments from a defunct Russian satellite have formed a large cloud of debris in low Earth orbit, posing a potential threat to the International Space Station (ISS) and with the crew having to take shelter while mission control checked for the chances of collision. On Wednesday, space-tracking firm LeoLabs detected a debris cloud forming after…
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Possible SpaceX Debris Crashes Onto Canadian Farm
It’s raining space junk. Just one month after NASA admitted that a piece of trash tossed from the International Space Station (ISS) crash-landed through a home in Florida, a massive piece of space debris ended up on a farm in Canada. A farmer in Saskatchewan, Canada discovered an 88-pound (40 kilograms) heavy piece of charred…
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Russian Space Junk Came Alarmingly Close to Smashing Into NASA Satellite
That was a really close one. Further analysis of a near-miss collision between two satellites in space revealed that they came even closer to one another than initially believed, raising more alarm over the growing danger of space debris. In late February, NASA’s TIMED spacecraft and the defunct Russian Cosmos 2221 nearly avoided crashing into…
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Satellites Are Getting a Constellation of Traffic Cops
Earth’s orbit will be monitored by a watchful set of robotic eyes, the first commercial constellation of satellites with the ability to keep track of objects in space to avoid collisions between spacecraft. Canadian startup NorthStar is getting ready to launch the first four of its Space Situational Awareness (SSA) satellites equipped with advanced optical…