Space crash called 'catastrophic,' lots of debris

A tiny Ecuadoran satellite that collided in space with the remains of a Soviet rocket survived the crash, but was damaged and is not transmitting, Quito's space agency said Thursday.

Nets, harpoons and suicide robots could become weapons of choice to hunt down the space junk threatening crucial communications satellites currently in orbit round Earth, scientists said Thursday.

(Phys.org) —The continuing growth in space debris poses an increasing threat to economically vital orbital regions. Next week, hundreds of top experts from across the globe will meet at Europe's largest-ever ...

(Phys.org) —NASA scientists don't often learn that their spacecraft is at risk of crashing into another satellite. But when Julie McEnery, the project scientist for NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, ...

Governments must start working urgently to remove orbital debris, which could become a catastrophic problem for satellites a few decades from now, a space science conference heard on Thursday.

(Phys.org) —Until recently, most everyone accepted the conventional wisdom that the moon has virtually no atmosphere. Just as the discovery of water on the moon transformed our textbook knowledge of Earth's ...

(Phys.org) —A billion-pixel view from the surface of Mars, from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, offers armchair explorers a way to examine one part of the Red Planet in great detail.

Using data gathered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission, scientists believe they have solved a mystery from one of the solar system's coldest regions—a permanently shadowed crater on the ...

Differences between Martian meteorites and rocks examined by a NASA rover can be explained if Mars had an oxygen-rich atmosphere 4000 million years ago—well before the rise of atmospheric oxygen on Earth ...

Strapped in an orange suit in his spaceship, Yuri Gagarin smiles as the rockets roar and chirpily tells mission control: "Let's go!"

(Phys.org) —On July 19, 2013, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will be turned to image Saturn and its entire ring system during a total eclipse of the sun, as it has done twice before during its previous 9 years ...

NASA announced Tuesday a Grand Challenge focused on finding all asteroid threats to human populations and knowing what to do about them.