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Satellite Technology
We’ve populated low-Earth orbit with satellites in record time — now we have to figure out how to keep it safe.
There are plenty of engineering obstacles, and those can be overcome. But you cannot change the laws of physics, and those matter too.
Two main contributors enabled our modern global positioning system (GPS): Albert Einstein and Gladys West. Here's how she made it happen.
Solar power has the disadvantage that there's no Sun at night. Satellite startup Reflect Orbital wants to change that, but at what cost?
The universe is filled with unlikely events, but it is also full of ways to fool ourselves.
Physicists recently created Coordinated Lunar Time, a time zone for our Moon.
Out beyond Neptune are some fascinating bodies left over from our Solar System's formation. Could one of them truly be spectacular?
Astranis is on a mission to help everyone in the world get online.
Space weather poses a tremendous threat to all satellites, knocking all computer systems offline. Is that a recipe for Kessler syndrome?
"Dead" satellites aren't just space junk. They are also targets for hackers to hijack and use to broadcast misinformation.
Forty Starlink satellites were destroyed earlier this year in a geomagnetic storm.
With launch costs dropping and enormous numbers of new satellites filling the sky, can't we just do it all from space?
‘Fast Optical Bursts’ will confound ground-based astronomy. As of 2021, planet Earth is currently experiencing the least pristine night sky in recorded history. Prior to the development of artificial lighting, […]
A black woman most have never heard of made GPS possible. Over the span of a single lifetime, the world has changed in ways that would have been virtually unimaginable […]
The night sky is already noticeably different, and bigger changes are ahead. For all of human history until the launch of Sputnik, the only objects in the night sky were naturally […]
It’s not just about SpaceX and Starlink. What we’re deciding today will have a global impact for years and decades to come. For countless millennia, human beings have gazed up into […]
The problem is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and the decision is all up to SpaceX whether they’ll fix it. On Wednesday morning, January 29, 2020, […]
Despite warnings and protestations from astronomers and skywatchers, Starlink is moving fast and breaking things. In May of this year, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched the first group of its new satellite […]
It’s a problem that we still haven’t solved, and it spells doom for all of our low-Earth orbiting satellites, even today. On October 4th, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, […]