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A big Chinese rocket body will likely crash back to Earth tomorrow (July 30)... The 25-ton (22.5 metric tons) core stage of a Long March 5B rocket will reenter Earth's atmosphere tomorrow at 2:05 p.m. EDT (1805 GMT), plus or minus five hours... Most of the rocket body will burn up, but big chunks of it will survive the fiery passage — probably 5.5 tons to 9.9 tons(opens in new tab) (5 to 9 metric tons).. Based on the core stage's orbit, we know those hunks will come down somewhere between 41 degrees north latitude and 41 degrees south latitude....

Some of the major components in most satellites include aluminum, Kevlar and aluminum alloys, which are able to withstand both temperature extremes and constant bombardment by radiation—all in a vacuum. Unfortunately, these characteristics also allow satellites to remain in orbit long after their usefulness has ended, resulting in constant additions to the space junk orbiting the planet. According to the World Economic Forum, there are currently approximately 6,000 satellites circling the Earth but only 60% of them are still in use. Some in the field have predicted that nearly 1,000 satellites will be launched into space each year over the...

A ball of light that blinked into South Florida’s inky predawn sky Wednesday before bursting into pieces with dazzling long-lived tails was a hunk of cosmic scrap metal, one of 25,000 objects the Air Force tracks in space. The flaming debris, part of a Chinese CZ3 rocket body, was forecast to reenter the atmosphere Wednesday morning but no one predicted the delight and awe it would spark in those who saw it lazily fall toward Earth just after 2 a.m. At least two people called the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, one who said there were UFOs over the skies...

The most powerful rocket to leave Earth since the Apollo missions launched from Florida yesterday. The Falcon Heavy jumbo rocket, developed by flamboyant SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk, had a sole 'passenger' onboard - a mannequin named 'Starman' - who rode to space inside a Tesla roadster. Incredible real-time footage has emerged from inside the car showing stunning views of our planet sailing past its windscreen, as David Bowie's Life on Mars plays in the background.

Since the 1970s, a number of geostationary satellites have been placed in the so called "graveyard orbit," an orbit just above the GEO altitude, roughly 100 to 300 km. The sole purpose of this "burial" location is to remove expired satellites from the highly-congested GEO ring about the equator. Although most GEO satellite operators have not taken advantage of removing their old spacecraft, there are over 100 already there. This number will continue to grow, because some 20 GEO birds expire each year, and some of these will be sent to the graveyard. Thus, the total number of graveyard residents...

Earlier this month, the State Department learned that debris from the Chinese weather satellite destroyed in their 2007 anti-satellite test would be coming uncomfortably close to another — functioning — Chinese satellite. So, like any good neighbor, State told China about the possibility of a collision. In technical terms, the US shared conjunction analysis with our PRC brethren. But, as often happens with the fabulously opaque Chinese government, the US isn’t sure if China heard us or believed us. At a conference on space debris last week in Germany, a U.S. military officer spoke with someone presumed to be a...

Every now and again someone raises a stern warning about the amount of space junk orbiting Earth. Those warnings are usually met with general indifference, as very few of us own satellites or travel regularly to low Earth orbit. But the DoD's assessment of the space junk problem finds that perhaps we should be paying attention: space junk has reached a critical tipping point that could result in a cataclysmic chain reaction that brings everyday life on Earth to a grinding halt. Our reliance on satellites goes beyond the obvious. We depend on them for television signals, the evening weather...

Germany’s five SAR-Lupe radar reconnaissance satellites in 2009 faced more than 800 close encounters with orbital junk or other operating satellites, including 32 passes at less than one kilometer from another SAR-Lupe spacecraft and one that required a collision-avoidance maneuver, the head of the new German Space Situational Awareness Center (GSSAC) said. Controllers of France’s Helios optical reconnaissance spacecraft, which operate in a different orbit, also were obliged to perform an avoidance maneuver in 2009 following an imminent-collision warning by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, a French government official said. The vulnerability of SAR-Lupe is one reason why the German...

Space experts from around the world will discuss ways of tackling the growing problem of space debris in orbit around the Earth. It comes just a year after an American satellite collided with a Russian satellite. There are thought to be more than 19,000 pieces of debris larger than 4 inches across racing around the Earth at high speeds, while there are more than 500,000 bigger than a postage stamp. The number of particles smaller than this are thought to exceed tens of millions. Despite their relatively small size, most are travelling faster than 15,600mph and at these speeds a...

US and Russian communications satellites have collided in space in what is thought to be the biggest incident of its kind to date. The US commercial Iridium spacecraft hit a defunct Russian satellite at an altitude of about 800km (500 miles) over Siberia on Tuesday, Nasa said. The risk to the International Space Station and a shuttle launch planned for later this month is said to be low. The impact produced a cloud of debris, which will be tracked into the future. Since the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, it is estimated about 6,000 satellites have been put in orbit....

Pieces of space junk from a Russian satellite coming out of orbit narrowly missed hitting a jetliner over the Pacific Ocean overnight. The pilot of a Lan Chile Airbus A340, which was travelling between Santiago, Chile, and Auckland, New Zealand, notified air traffic controllers at Auckland Oceanic Centre after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane about 10pm. According to a plane spotter, who was tuning into a high frequency radio broadcast at the time, the pilot "reported that the rumbling noise from the space debris could be...

For decades, space experts have worried that a speeding bit of orbital debris might one day smash a large spacecraft into hundreds of pieces and start a chain reaction, a slow cascade of collisions that would expand for centuries, spreading chaos through the heavens. In the past decade or so, as scientists came to agree that the number of objects in orbit had surpassed a critical mass - or, in their terms, the critical spatial density, the point at which a chain reaction becomes inevitable - they grew more anxious. Early this year, after a half- century of growth, the...

Leonard David Senior Space Writer SPACE.com In a unique case of space bumper cars, two pieces of rocket hardware have collided high above Earth. The orbital run-in involved a 31-year-old U.S. rocket body and a fragment from a more recently launched Chinese rocket stage. The collision occurred on January 17 of this year, with the incident happening some 550 miles (885 kilometers) above Earth. That area of low Earth orbit (LEO) has an above-average satellite population density. The American and Chinese space hardware cruised through space in similar orbits at the time of the rear-ender. The U.S. Surveillance Network of...