Amateur astronomer discovers Jupiter collision

21 July, 2009– " Jupiter's moon, Ganymede, sits behind the solar system's largest planet, April 2007. Ganymede completes an orbit around Jupiter every seven days. (NASA: ESA/E Karkoschka (University of Arizona), fileman) " " An amateur astronomer from the small...

Japan to launch ‘suicide’ satellites to clear space junk

With space junk increasingly becoming an important problem for the functionality of the International Space Station (ISS) and commercial satellites circling the Earth’s orbit, Japanese space scientists came up with the idea of building ‘suicide’ satellites that would...

Huge asteroid passes close to Earth

An asteroid has passed close to Earth say scientists, and it could be as big as a ten-storey building. It is known as 2009, DD45, and could be as big as 21-47 meters across. " The gap was just 72,000 km (44,750 miles); a fifth of the distance between our planet and the Moon....

Satellites Collide in Orbit

Do satellites ever collide with one another in space? Yes. In fact, it just happened. A derelict Russian satellite, defunct for the past ten years, collided with an operational-until-just-now communications satellite operated by Iridium LLC.  The debris created by the...