Satellite

In an historic experiment, ESA has made a controlled reentry of its Atmospheric Dynamics Mission-Aeolus (ADM-Aeolus) satellite in a maneuver designed to reduce the risk of such end-of-life events creating space debris or fragments reaching the ground.

Radio telescopes are picking up strange signals from an intelligent lifeform – ourselves. A new study has shown that satellite constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink swarm are unintentionally leaking signals that can interfere with vital observations.

California startup Varda has celebrated the deployment of its first satellite, a test run of a fascinating space-based pharmaceuticals factory that moonlights as a hypersonic test rig during its Mach 25 re-entry to keep costs down.

As its Aeolus wind monitoring mission comes to an end, ESA is testing new procedures for deorbiting the decommissioned 1360-kg (3,000 lb) spacecraft to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, advancing international space safety standards.

Ahead of the start of the Atlantic hurricane season next month, two storm-monitoring NASA CubeSats have successfully launched into space atop a Rocket Lab Electron booster from the Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula.

Meteor showers are beautiful astronomical phenomena, but they can be fickle. Now a Japanese company is planning to put on artificial shooting star shows on demand with the Sky Canvas project. And there might be some scientific benefits to it as well.

Northrop Grumman and Tokyo-based IHI Corporation are teaming up to develop small, highly maneuverable Space Domain Awareness (SDA) satellites for Japan to protect commercial satellites from potentially hostile spacecraft.

A small satellite developed by MIT engineers has set a new record for data transmission between a satellite and Earth. The TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system used a laser to beam huge amounts of data at up to 100 gigabits per second.

After three years circling the Earth, the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 mission has come to an end following a fiery reentry. The satellite was an important tech demo for solar sailing, which could eventually propel spacecraft to other stars.

The Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957. Fast forward to 2022, and we are now launching more than a thousand satellites each year, propelling the field of Earth science into unprecedented terrain.

Stars are hot balls of plasma, but astronomers have now spotted a super strange one that may have a solid surface. Its intense magnetic field is strong enough to overcome its blistering temperatures and “freeze” its outer layers into a solid crust.

New analysis of a volcanic eruption off the coast of Tonga earlier this year has revealed the true extent of the massive explosion, and established its plume as the highest on record and the first recorded entering the mesosphere.