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Tag: Low Earth Orbit

  • A NASA Space Telescope Is Falling Out of the Sky. Can This Startup Save it?

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    An Earth-orbiting NASA telescope is slowly falling out of the sky, with a 90% chance of uncontrolled reentry by the end of 2026. To avoid this risk and extend the observatory’s lifespan, NASA has tapped an Arizona-based spaceflight startup to launch a daring rescue mission.

    Katalyst Space Technologies, headquartered in Flagstaff, has received a $30 million award from NASA to give the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory an orbital boost. To that end, Katalyst is developing the “LINK” spacecraft, designed to autonomously rendezvous with Swift and shift it into a more stable orbit.

    Katalyst has less than eight months to get LINK off the ground and save Swift, with a launch deadline of June 2026. Oh, and according to a company announcement made Wednesday, it plans to launch the mission via a rocket dropped out of a plane. No biggie.

    Saving Swift from its slow demise

    The Swift observatory launched in 2004 to observe gamma-ray bursts—the most violent explosions in the known universe. Over its two decades in low-Earth orbit, Swift has gradually lost altitude, as all satellites do. But recent spikes in solar activity have increased atmospheric drag on the spacecraft, accelerating its orbital decay to a concerning rate.

    As Swift sinks back to Earth, atmospheric drag intensifies. At this rate, the observatory has a 50% chance of uncontrolled reentry by mid-2026 and a 90% chance by the end of next year, according to Katalyst. Though Swift would completely burn up in the atmosphere and pose no threat to people and property on Earth, NASA and Katalyst hope to extend its lifespan.

    Pegasus’s heroic comeback

    Katalyst has selected Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus rocket as the launch vehicle for this rescue mission. Pegasus is an air-launched rocket, meaning it gets dropped from a carrier aircraft at 40,000 feet (12,000 meters), then freefalls for five seconds before igniting its first-stage rocket motor and ascending to orbit.

    Pegasus’s launch cadence has slowed significantly as cheaper, ground-launched rockets have become widely available. The Katalyst mission will be its first flight since 2021. According to the company, “Pegasus is the only system that can meet the orbit, timeline, and budget simultaneously.”

    Swift orbits the planet at a 20.6-degree inclination to avoid the South Atlantic Anomaly—a large weak spot in Earth’s magnetic field that exposes satellites to higher levels of radiation. Because of this, a rocket launched from Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg would require a huge amount of propellant to reach the right orbital plane for this mission, Kieran Wilson, vice president of technology at Katalyst, told SpaceNews.

    Pegasus’s air-launch design overcomes this hurdle. And since it’s a flight-proven vehicle, it’s ready to launch on short notice.

    Once Pegasus deploys LINK, the spacecraft will approach Swift with a series of precise maneuvers known as rendezvous proximity operations, according to Katalyst. Because Swift doesn’t have docking ports or grappling fixtures for LINK to grab onto, it will use a custom-built robotic capture mechanism to attach to a feature on the body of the satellite and adjust its orbit.

    If the mission succeeds, it won’t just extend the lifespan of a highly valuable research satellite; it will demonstrate a useful new capability for NASA. Being able to execute a rapid response to orbital decay would be a key asset to the agency, helping it better maintain its fleet of spacecraft in low-Earth orbit.

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    Ellyn Lapointe

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  • Space Startup Wants to Deliver Cargo Anywhere on Earth in One Hour

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    A new kind of delivery system is being set up in low Earth orbit. Inversion Space, a relatively small space startup founded in 2021, is prepping its space-based delivery vehicle for flight. The reusable spacecraft is designed to drop off cargo from space to Earth on a tight schedule, building a constellation of on-demand vehicles parked in orbit.

    This week, Inversion unveiled its flagship Arc vehicle, a 4-foot wide, 8-foot tall spaceplane, cargo capsule hybrid capable of carrying 500 pounds (225 kilograms) of supplies. The California-based startup is aiming to launch Arc by the end of 2026, building on the lessons learned from the inaugural mission of its demo vehicle earlier this year.

    Space delivery

    The idea behind building Arc is not just providing access to space, but rather being able to deliver cargo from orbit to anywhere on the planet within an hour’s time. The autonomous vehicle will launch to low Earth orbit, where it will be positioned there to store cargo for up to five years.

    When needed, Arc is built to reenter through the atmosphere and land on Earth using parachutes. The spacecraft is equipped with a deorbit engine and an autonomously maneuverable parachute to help it make its way down to the surface. It’s built to withstand hypersonic speeds, capture and deploy assets, as well as rendezvous with other spacecraft in orbit.

    Inversion’s vision is to be able to deploy a constellation of its reusable vehicles in orbit, and return them to Earth based on the needs of its customers. The company is specifically targeting military payloads, hoping the U.S. military can make good use of the vehicle’s speediness at returning to Earth. “Arc reshapes defense readiness by enabling access to anywhere on Earth in under an hour – allowing for the rapid delivery of mission-critical cargo and effects to austere, infrastructure-limited, or denied environments,” Inversion Space wrote on X. “This capability establishes space as a new global logistics domain, introducing unprecedented speed, reach, and resiliency for national security.”

    Inversion launched its first vehicle in January as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-12 rideshare mission. The spacecraft, named Ray, was a demonstration of the company’s new technologies, testing its in-orbit systems and reentry capabilities. The mission was mostly a success, but Ray experienced a propulsion malfunction that hindered its ability to reenter through Earth’s atmosphere.

    “Our first spacecraft, Ray, has completed its mission on-orbit – serving as an extremely successful testbed for validating key technologies despite not attempting re-entry due to an on-orbit short circuit in a component preventing our deorbit engine from igniting,” the company wrote in a statement.

    The company notes that nearly all systems on board the spacecraft were built in-house with a small team of 25 people. Inversion may be a newcomer to the space industry, but the startup is aiming to build hundreds of its vehicles per year and establish a constellation of cargo reentry spacecraft by 2028.

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    Passant Rabie

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  • SpaceX Saturday Starlink launch on schedule

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    Sept. 13 (UPI) — SpaceX is scheduled to launch its Falcon 9 rocket Saturday, which will deliver 24 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit.

    Liftoff from launch site SLC-4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California remained on schedule Saturday morning, with ignition expected to occur at 1:55 p.m. EDT, SpaceX confirmed on its launch schedule page.

    The California-based space technology company’s latest mission will carry another 24 V2 Mini satellites operated by its Starlink telecom subsidiary.

    SpaceX will live stream the operation on X, beginning around five minutes before liftoff, which will mark the company’s 42nd launch from California this year.

    The mission will bring the total number of Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit to more than 8,400.

    The California-based space technology company’s latest mission will carry 24 V2 Mini satellites operated by its Starlink telecom subsidiary. File Photo courtesy of SpaceX

    The flight will also mark the 28th for this first stage booster, with the Falcon 9 rocket having previously propelled 16 Starlink missions, as well as several other satellite transportation flights.

    The rocket also took part in NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission in 2022, which conducted a global survey of nearly all water on Earth’s surface.

    Rocket separation is expected to occur a little over eight minutes into the flight.

    Following the launch, the rocket will land back in the Pacific Ocean off the Southern California coast, where it will be recovered by the company’s Of Course I Still Love You droneship.

    SpaceX also has a launch set for Sunday, when a separate Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida carrying Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus mission 23 to the International Space Station.

    Two more Starlink launches are also scheduled to lift off next week Wednesday and Thursday.

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  • SpaceX launch pushes 2025 Starlink satellite deployments past 2,000

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    Sept. 6 (UPI) — SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday to deliver 24 Starlink V2 mini satellites, with the company now deploying more than 2,000 such satellites to space in 2025.

    The rocket lifted off at 2:05 p.m. EDT from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base and used the same first-stage Falcon 9 booster rocket that had completed 19 previous launch missions.

    Prior missions by the Falcon 9 booster, number B1075, include 16 batches of Starlink satellites, a transporter mission and delivery of 10 satellites into low Earth orbit for the U.S. Space Development Agency.

    The booster rocket successfully landed eight minutes and 19 seconds after launch on the drone ship named Of Course I Still Love You, which was positioned in the Pacific Ocean.

    The landing on the autonomous drone ship was the 149th for that vessel and the 501st SpaceX landing on a drone ship, according to Spaceflight Now.

    A second-stage booster continued to ferry the Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit before its engine cut off 53 minutes and 35 seconds after launch, followed by deployment of each of the 24 satellites.

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  • How space junk is making the sky more metallic

    How space junk is making the sky more metallic

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    As several decades’ worth of satellites and spacecraft have fallen back to Earth, their flaming-hot atmospheric reentries have started polluting the stratosphere with metal.

    Data collected by a high-altitude research plane over the Arctic during a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) mission, revealed that 20 different metallic elements that do not naturally occur in Earth’s atmosphere were present. This including silver, iron, lead, magnesium, titanium, beryllium, chromium, nickel and zinc.

    As revealed in a paper published in the journal PNAS, the scientists state that this metal pollution in the stratosphere is likely due to the huge amount of space junk we have in orbit falling back into the atmosphere one by one.

    Stock image of the Earth from space. Scientists have found higher levels of metals in the stratosphere than expected.
    ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS

    “About half of the particles in the stratosphere naturally contain small amounts of iron, magnesium, and other metals from meteors. Right now there is much more iron from meteors than metals from reentering satellites and rocket boosters. However, the metals from reentry are different from those in meteors, so reentry is introducing new metals into the stratosphere,” Daniel Murphy, a research chemist at the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory, told Newsweek.

    The foreign metals were found embedded in around 10 percent of sulfuric acid particles that largely make up the stratosphere, which is the atmospheric layer between 7.5 and 31 miles above the ground. The scientists worry that with increased satellite launches in the coming years, the level of such metals in the atmosphere will increase as these satellites reenter, jumping to being embedded to as much as 50 percent of sulfuric acid particles.

    “With expected increases in the number of satellites, the amount of aluminum and other metals from reentry could become comparable to the amount of iron and other metals from meteors,” Murphy said.

    The potential for this increased metal level in the stratosphere to cause harm to humans is still unclear, the scientists say, but it is not likely to directly affect peoples’ health.

    “We are just becoming aware that the metals from spacecraft reentry end up in particles in the stratosphere so we don’t yet know the possible impacts on the stratosphere. We haven’t observed any definite impacts but but it is uncomfortable to not know whether or not there are impacts from this rapidly growing industry,” Murphy said.

    reentry
    NOAA graphic of how reentering satellites and space junk leach metal into the atmosphere.
    Chelsea Thompson/NOAA

    “We do not think there is much chance of direct health effects on humans compared to the much larger emissions from industrial processes at ground level. Any harm, if it occurs, would be indirect through changes in the stratosphere.”

    Over 15,000 satellites have been put into orbit around the Earth since the 1950s. There are 8,774 satellites currently in orbit around the Earth as of October 25, according to the tracking website Orbiting Now. There is also a huge amount of space junk and debris in orbit, with millions of minuscule chunks of metal zooming around the planet.

    Two of the most surprising elements the scientists saw in the aforementioned particles were niobium and hafnium, both of which are rare elements that are not expected in the stratosphere, but are used in heat-resistant, high-performance alloys.

    Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about satellites in orbit? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.