Countries have submitted applications for hundreds of thousands of new satellites to be launched. The scale poses challenges for overcrowding orbit, with environmental and safety challenges.
Academic rigor, journalistic flair
Articles on Space debris
Displaying 1 - 20 of 43 articles
Earth’s orbits are getting more and more crowded. To keep track of everything and avoid collisions and catastrophes, we need a new field: space domain awareness.
Treaties meant to ensure sustainability in space don’t currently regulate private companies, and not every country has signed on to an agreement for sustainable space exploration.
Space exploration is often propelled by competition, driven by national pride and with little thought about consequence. It is time to consider space as a commons, not just a resource to exploit.
A mysterious hunk of space junk buzzed through Australian skies last night. It may have been the third stage of a Soyuz 2 rocket just launched by Russia.
How might the space industry reduce its ecological footprint and better manage the debris it leaves in its wake?
Discarded pieces of landing gear, crashed spacecraft and wear and tear have produced a lot of debris that is now scattered around the Martian surface.
To date, not a single orbiting object has been recovered from space successfully. But several methods are in development to reduce the overpopulation of Earth’s orbit by man-made debris.
As far as we know, only one person has ever been directly struck by space debris. That was back in 1997.
The southern hemisphere is more likely to be hit by space debris than the northern one.
How will they bring the structure back safely? And where will the surviving components crash?
Russia’s testing of an anti-satellite weapon risked the life of astronauts on the International Space Station and could have astronomical impacts on Earth.
A Russian satellite has been destroyed in a missile strike, creating a vast amount of debris that joins the tens of thousands of pieces already in orbit around the Earth.
Russia destroyed one of its old satellites during a successful test of an anti-satellite weapon. A space security expert explains what this weapon was and the dangers of the expanding debris field.
Sure, they’re billionaires, but the exploits of Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos have undeniably brought space tourism a step closer. That raises tricky legal, ethical and environmental questions.
Chances are small that space junk will destroy property or harm a person, and existing space law could deal with such an event. But current law doesn’t address the bigger problem of space pollution.
You might think lots of meteorites ultimately come from comets. Turns out, you’d be wrong, according to a new study that tracked meteors hurtling through the sky to find out where they came from.
Several spaceflights scheduled over the next few years will take non-astronauts to space. But it’s not certain this privilege will ever extend to anyone beyond the extremely wealthy.
China’s Long March 5B rocket, after a successful blast-off in April to deliver a space station module, is now on track to crash-land somewhere with a latitude between New York and New Zealand.
Earth orbit is filling up with satellites and space junk. Technological fixes can only go so far to deal with the problem.
Top contributors
-
Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences, The Open University
-
Emeritus Professor of International Law, Western Sydney University
-
Professor of Strategy and Security Studies, Air University
-
Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland
-
Senior Research Fellow in Aerospace Engineering, University of Southern Queensland
-
Lecturer in Public Policy, University of Auckland
-
University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona
-
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology
-
Co-Director – Centre for Pūtaiao, University of Auckland
-
Research Assistant, University of Auckland
-
Pro Vice-Chancellor Flagship Initiatives, Swinburne University of Technology
-
Associate Professor in Astronomy, Monash University
-
Associate Professor, RMIT University
-
Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University
-
Lecturer in Creative Arts, Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland
