Tag Archives: orbit

In the third launch of its larger New Glenn rocket, and the first time Blue Origin had attempted to re-use a booster, it failed to place its payload into an effective orbit. Now, the satellite will need to be de-orbited, TechCrunch reports. Although the company in question has many more …

NASA has announced that for the first time, it will contract out a private spacecraft to reboost one of its falling satellites: the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. The observatory has spent the past 20 years searching for gamma-ray bursts. The commercial company will launch a new reboosting spacecraft in spring …

A defunct Russian satellite broke up this week, sending a cloud of dangerous debris zipping around Earth. Skywatchers identified more than 100 pieces of space junk spreading out from the satellite’s former location, causing astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) to shelter in various spacecraft, including the troubled Boeing …

NASA has announced preliminary results from the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which successfully smashed into the asteroid Dimorphos several weeks ago. Now, the mission is successful in more ways than one — NASA would have been happy with altering the space rock’s orbit by a few seconds, but …

Getting into space is hard, and one of the reasons is that it takes a lot of energy to break free of Earth’s gravity. So far, the only way we’ve found to do that reliably is with rockets, but a startup called SpinLaunch has something else in mind. Using a …

  Space around Mars is much busier than usual right now. The red planet made a close pass of Earth last summer, and numerous space agencies planned their Mars missions around this event. Now, the spacecraft are starting to show up — NASA’s Perseverance rover will land later this month, …

With 3.14-Day Orbit The longer we study the universe, the more exoplanets we find. Many of these discoveries are notable because of how Earth-like they are or because of the number of planets crammed into a single solar system. The rocky planet K2-315b, on the other hand, is notable because …

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has sent back some incredible images and data from the Red Planet of the years, and it just hit an important milestone. It has now made 50,000 orbits of Mars since it arrived more than 11 years ago. Lockheed Martin really built this spacecraft to …

Human space exploration has been limited to low-Earth orbit ever since the end of the Apollo program, but SpaceX is looking to change that. Of course, we’ve known that for a while, but a new announcement from CEO Elon Musk pushed the timeline for humanity’s return to the moon up …

Former astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, has died aged 95. Pallab Ghosh looks back at the day he made history.