Astroscale is a 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair winner for developing a satellite designed to rendezvous with space junk, with the goal of capturing it and guiding it toward a fiery grave in Earth’s atmosphere. The question Can the space industry develop new technologies that help tackle the growing problem of debris and create a more […]
Origami Space Planes Could Solve a Major Problem in Orbit
Building a spacecraft could one day be as simple as folding a piece of paper into a plane and letting aerodynamics do the rest. A team of researchers from the University of Tokyo simulated the release of a paper airplane from the International Space Station (ISS) to see if would survive atmospheric reentry. In a […]
53-Year-Old Soviet Spacecraft Will Plummet Back to Earth This Week
Kosmos 482 has been trapped in Earth’s orbit for 53 years but its wandering journey is coming to an end. The failed Venus mission is expected to reenter through the atmosphere in a dramatic fall toward its home planet, where it may remain intact or scatter its bits across a still unknown location on either […]