The Ecuadorean space agency (EXA) announced that NEE-01 Pegaso, the first Ecuadorian satellite encountered a field of micro particles left by a Soviet rocket at 640 km of altitude. It is still unclear if the collision may have damaged the satellite. On May 22, the U.S. Joint Space Operations Center notified EXA of a possible collision for the day after, [...]
Post Tagged with: “collision”
IAASS Publishes New Text: Safety Design for Space Operations
The International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS) has just published the book “Safety Design for Space Operations” (Elsevier, 2013). The book comes four years after “Safety Design for Space Systems,” a university level textbook recently translated into Chinese. With contributions from more than 40 authors, chosen from among the best in their respective fields, the project was coordinated by IAASS President Tommaso Sgobba, and edited by Dr. Firooz Allahdadi, Isabelle [...]
Bezos Recovers Apollo F-1 Engines From Ocean Floor
Jeff Bezos has successfully recovered enough components to reconstruct 2 Saturn V main engines from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com had been planning to locate and raise the 3.76 meter diameter Rocketdyne F-1 engines since 2012, and on 20th March 2013 the mission was declared a success. Bezos and the crew of the [...]
Fengyun 1C Debris Collided with BLITS Satellite
A release from AGI concludes that a change in orbit and spin period for the active Russian BLITS satellite reported on February 4 is due to collision with a piece of Chinese ASAT debris from Fengyun 1C. The change was observed by Institute for Precision Instrument Engineering (IPIE) scientists Dr. Vasiliy Yurasov and Dr. Andrey Nazarenko. They recorded a sudden decrease [...]
Why Satellites Fail
Why do satellites fail? Although it may seem like a simple question, the answer is sometimes elusive. When a spacecraft like the European Space Agency’s Olympus communication satellite in 1993 or the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Midori II in 2002 just stops working, it has not always been possible to determine exactly what went wrong. Micrometeoroid impacts, space debris collisions, and radiation-induced electronics [...]
Europe Steps Up to Develop Space-Surveillance Network
On February 28, the European Commission (EC), the executive body of the European Union (EU), launched a new program to address the space debris problem. “Some EU Member States have national systems, radars or telescopes that could be used for monitoring satellites and space debris,” reported the EC in a statement. However, “European satellite operators almost completely depend on United States space surveillance [...]
Mass of the Largest Fragment of the Russian Meteorite Estimated to be 200-500 kg
On February 23, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) published the first calculations of the detailed trajectory, landing masses of individual pieces, and expected landing sites of the fragments of the Russian Meteorite that crashed down near Chelyabinsk on February 15, 2013. The report was published in the IAU’s Electronic Telegram No. 3423. This service is only available to registered members [...]
ATLAS, the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System
A team of astronomers from the University of Hawaii is developing a system to indentify dangerous asteroids before their final fall to Earth. According to the researchers, the system will offer a 1 week warning for a 45 meter diameter and 3 weeks for a 140 meter diameter asteroid. “That’s enough time to evacuate the area of people, take measures [...]
Debris Falls from Orbit, Slowly
On February 25, projections forecast decay of a piece of catalogued debris from the Breeze-M upper stage that malfunctioned during an August 6, 2012 launch and subsequently exploded in orbit on October 16, 2012. The debris was anticipated to touch down over Indonesia. No sightings have been reported and it is possible the debris completely burned up in the atmosphere. There’s plenty more [...]
Russian Meteorite Bound to Become the 20th Meteorite with a “Birth Certificate”
There is nothing particularly rare about meteorites. More than 50,000 various pieces of space rock have been collected around the globe throughout the history. What is rare though is a meteorite that has been observed, whose descent through the atmosphere has been recorded, and whose trajectory has been subsequently calculated (including the path in the Solar System prior to the [...]
