The debris arrives in the rockets’ wake: melted plastics, aluminum and pieces of blue adhesive. It all ends up stranded on ...

New modeling of carbon cycle shows unsteady but habitable history before liquid water disappeared New models from recent ...

New data analysis indicates that NASA and its partners could have more cost-effective methods for dealing with the growing issue of orbital debris than previously thought. A new report from NASA's ...

Also called space debris, space junk is comprised of non-operational satellites and other human-made objects that continue to hurtle around Earth's orbit long after they served their purpose.

In low-earth orbit, objects can collide at around 23,000 miles an hour, enough for even the tiniest debris to crack the windows on the International Space Station.

The threat that orbital debris poses routinely makes itself known. The ISS, which orbits lower than this recent near miss at around 254 miles (408 km), has had to perform numerous avoidance ...

Cleaning up space debris seems rather unnecessary in this perspective, except that even the tiniest chunk travels at orbital velocities of multiple kilometers per second with kinetic energy to spare.

In 2009, a defunct Russian spacecraft crashed into a U.S. commercial spacecraft and destroyed it — creating even more large chunks of orbital debris. ( These are the worst disasters in space ...

Like satellites, LEO debris whizzes around the planet at 17,000 miles an hour (27,400 kilometers an hour) or more. The orbits of these objects differ in direction, orbital plane, and speed ...

Astroscale Japan Inc. has announced that it has successfully approached a piece of orbital debris traveling at a high speed to inspect it from a distance of about 15 meters.

It takes “several years” for debris to return at altitudes of 373 miles (600 kilometers) or less, but centuries for “orbital decay” to occur at 497 miles (800 kilometers).