Browsing: Satellite

There are currently an estimated 19,000 individual space debris swirling around Earth’s orbit at 17,000 miles/hour, posing great threat to current active satellites, telescopes, future launches in orbit, the International Space Station and even astronauts out on space walks. It’s very clear that something must be done, before the Earth gets one of its own […]

A while ago NASA launched its next generation weather satellite, the Suomi NPP satellite, into low-orbit, on a mission to  collect critical data set to improve short-term weather forecasts and increase understanding of long-term climate change. Besides, valuable scientific measurements, the NPP satellite also provides some incredible glimpses of our planet in great detail. We showed you […]

Less than a month ago, on the 28th of October, the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project (NPP) satellite launched into low-Earth with the main purpose of observing our planet’s environment and climate, some 800 km above our planet. Here you can see one of its first pictures, and what a picture it […]

This Friday morning NASA will upgrade its climate and weather observatory capabilities, when it’s set to launch a new, high-end satellite via a United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket, which promises to significantally improve weather forecast and offer a significant leap forward to authorities in the face of calamities. The project, lengthy dubbed the National Polar-Orbiting […]

Satellite deployments make up most of the space launches in any given year, however it’s also a highly risky operation. Every satellite launch costs around $10,000 per pound, and basically it’s fairly common for the total cost of a satellite to jump in the tens of millions of dollars range. Currently, in the geosynchronous orbit there […]

Last year, Iran successfully launched a rocket that carried a mouse, a turtle and worms into space. This summer, the Iranian Space Organization is planning on taking its space program one step further by sending a monkey into orbit this summer. This was revealed this Thursday by Iran’s top space official at a press conference  […]

As you should know, chlorophyll is the biomolecule responsible for turning sunlight into energy; but what you probably don’t know is that a satellite, GeoEye’s OrbView 2 satellite, was launched with the main goal of monitoring chlorophyll levels on the planet. Another interesting fact about this particular satellite is that Google has exclusive online mapping […]

NASA is going through a whole lot during period: discussions about budget cuts, problems with launches, even with Hubble, and many, many more smaller or bigger problems are denting one of the finest organizations in the world. But a pair of costly satellite crashes mean dealt an even more severe blow to the space agency, […]

Private company SpaceX has successfully delivered its first payload into orbit. It was the second successful launch for the company, which aims to reduce the cost of reaching orbit by a factor of ten. The launch took place Monday from Omelek in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii. The two-stage […]

Our life may be better or worse, our health may be better or worse, but one thing has definitely improved over the past decades: technology; and that’s a really big thing. So what better way to prove the progress of technology than 2 pictures of Earth? The first was taken from the weather […]