On Wednesday (Dec. 17), this particular Starlink suffered an anomaly that caused a loss of communication with the ground and an unscheduled venting of its propulsion tank. The satellite is now tumbling and headed down toward Earth’s atmosphere, where it will be incinerated in a matter of weeks, according to SpaceX.

SpaceX asked Vantor (previously known as Maxar Intelligence) to image the stricken satellite, to get a better understanding of its condition. And Vantor delivered.

The company used its WorldView-3 Earth-observing satellite to image the Starlink spacecraft on Thursday (Dec. 18) from a distance of 150 miles (241 kilometers).

The photo, taken while the duo were flying over Alaska, features a resolution of 4.7 inches (12 centimeters), providing SpaceX with key information about the satellite.

"Our team took advantage of the advanced capabilities of our non-Earth imaging technology and recently expanded collection capacity to move quickly and provide SpaceX with confirmation that their satellite was mostly intact," Todd Surdey, Vantor’s executive vice president and general manager of enterprise and emerging products, said in a statement on Saturday (Dec. 20). "This rapid intelligence delivery enabled them to quickly assess possible damage to the spacecraft."

There is apparently some damage: Data suggests that the satellite released a small number of debris objects as a result of the anomaly. But those pieces, and the satellite itself, shouldn't a present a problem to other spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO), according to SpaceX.

"We appreciate the rapid response by @vantortech to provide this imagery. Additional data suggest that there is a small number of trackable debris objects from the event, and we expect the satellite and debris to reenter and fully demise within weeks," Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said in an X post on Saturday.

Starlink is by far the largest satellite constellation ever assembled. It currently consists of about 9,300 active spacecraft — about 65% of all the operational satellites in Earth orbit.

The image reveals the thermal footprint of a major Bitcoin-mining data center in Rockdale, Texas, which has been widely criticized for its electricity consumption and carbon footprint.

SatVu didn't disclose which specific facility is in the image, but Rockdale is home to the Riot Platforms Bitcoin mine. The facility, considered the largest in the U.S., has an energy consumption of 700 megawatts, requiring about as much electricity as 300,000 homes.

The satellite image reveals in a resolution of 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) where and how much heat leaks into the environment from the plant. SatVu thinks that the insights that could be gleaned from such images could help regulators and grid operators better understand the impact such facilities have on the environment and local power networks.

"Today's data center buildout is moving incredibly quickly, and the world needs better ways to understand what's actually happening on the ground," Thomas Cobti, SatVu's VP for Business Development, said in a statement. "Thermal data gives an objective view of operational activity as it occurs — not weeks later through reports or announcements."

Although the image was only released on Dec. 17, it was most likely captured already in 2023, before SatVu's HotSat-1 satellites failed in orbit in December that year. SatVu plans to launch its replacement HotSat-2 next year and is already building HotSat-3.

The thermal camera aboard these satellites is the best in class, providing an order of a magnitude better resolution than other temperature-measuring devices in orbit.

SatVu released the first HotSat-1 images in October 2023, capturing the heat trails behind locomotives and showing how heat spreads from large sun-drenched concrete parking lots in a city like Las Vegas.

With the newly released image, the company shows how satellites could keep an objective eye on a fast-growing and controversial sector.

"At a closer level, [the image] reveals which substations and cooling systems are under load — clear, physical indicators of real operational behavior," the company said in the statement. "Together, these layers provide a grounded, evidence-based view of how major data center sites are evolving in real time."

A closer inspection of the image shows "distinct thermal signatures across rooftop chillers, transformers and electrical yards, making clear which parts of the facility are active and which remain dormant," SatVu added.

According to the McKinsey consultancy, investment into computing data centers will continue to grow, reaching more than $7 billion by 2030. Global data centers are believed to contribute by about 0.5% to the global carbon dioxide emissions. Bitcoin mining is especially energy intensive, a recent study estimated that one Bitcoin transaction generates about as much carbon dioxide as a gasoline car generates in a 1,600-mile (2,500-kilometer) drive.

Space insurance underwriters typically offer premiums that are mission-wide and include possible satellite replacement and can therefore be very expensive. California on-orbit services startup Arkisys is now teaming up with London-based Odin Space to offer its customers specific collision insurance, based on verified debris impact data from Odin Space's sensors.

Arkisys's upcoming Cutter mission will carry sensors from Odin Space, which is developing advanced space debris detection. Odin Space's Nano Sensors are designed to act as a "black box" for spacecraft, being able to pinpoint the exact moment of an impact to a spacecraft and its location. Forensic on-orbit data collected by the sensors can then be used to verify that a damaged spacecraft experienced an on-orbit impact event consistent with debris or micrometeoroid strikes.

Cutter is designed to host payloads or provide "last mile" transportation after launch, such as delivery to Arkisys Port modules in orbit. The new move aims to provide assurance to customers in an evolving and innovative space ecosystem amid the growing threat of space debris, without being prohibitively expensive.

"By enabling insurance for the Arkisys Port Architecture flight elements (Cutter and Port Modules) in orbit, this partnership offers customers not just a new on-orbit commercial logistics domain but a proven method to safeguard their business investments and operations," David Barnhart, CEO and co-founder of Arkisys, said in a statement.

"We see this partnership as one of the key enablers for the new in-space circular economy to enable thousands of new customers to develop new commercial innovations in space," he added. "We are proud to host Odin's unique new technology that enables this next step in space commercialization."

Odin Space is working to predict and monitor dangerous sub-centimeter orbital debris, which can't be tracked from the ground. Even such tiny pieces can do serious damage: Space debris travels at orbital speeds of roughly 4.5 to 5 miles per second (7 to 8 kilometers per second), with relative collision velocities of up to 9.3 miles per second (15 km per second), meaning any impact with a spacecraft will be highly energetic and potentially mission-ending. Earlier this month. the company secured seed funding of $3 million from investors, boosting its plans to track and map debris threats with its Nano Sensors and Scout Satellites.

"Our partnership with Arkisys marks a pivotal shift in how the industry tackles the rising threat of lethal, non-trackable debris," James New, CEO and Co-founder of Odin Space, said in the same statement. "Equipping Arkisys spacecraft with Odin's Nano Sensors is the first move in a new era of safer, smarter, more sustainable space activity."

Odin Space carried out its first orbital space junk tracking system test in 2023, hitching a ride on SpaceX's Transporter 8 mission.

The mishap led to a loss of communication with the Starlink spacecraft, which was orbiting at an altitude of 260 miles (418 kilometers), according to the company.

In addition, "the anomaly led to venting of the propulsion tank, a rapid decay in semi-major axis by about 4 km [2.5 miles], and the release of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects," representatives of Starlink, a company that's owned by SpaceX, said in an X post on Thursday morning (Dec. 18). That description suggests that the Starlink satellite's propulsion tank may have ruptured or suffered some other type of damage.

SpaceX is working with NASA and the U.S. Space Force to keep tabs on the newly liberated pieces of space debris, the post continued, stressing that there's not much to worry about.

"The satellite is largely intact, tumbling, and will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and fully demise within weeks. The satellite's current trajectory will place it below the @Space_Station, posing no risk to the orbiting lab or its crew," Starlink representatives wrote.

"As the world’s largest satellite constellation operator, we are deeply committed to space safety," they added. "We take these events seriously. Our engineers are rapidly working to root cause and mitigate the source of the anomaly and are already in the process of deploying software to our vehicles that increases protections against this type of event."

The Starlink megaconstellation is by far the largest ever assembled. It currently consists of nearly 9,300 active satellites, meaning that SpaceX operates about 65% of all the functional spacecraft zipping around our planet.

And that number is growing all the time. SpaceX has launched 122 Starlink missions this year alone, sending more than 3,000 of the satellites to low Earth orbit.

Starlink satellites have a design lifetime of about five years, and SpaceX deorbits each one intentionally before it conks out in orbit.

The company has taken other steps to mitigate the space-junk threat posed by the megaconstellation as well. For example, Starlink spacecraft avoid potential collisions autonomously, an ability they put into practice quite often: In the first six months of 2025, Starlink satellites conducted about 145,000 evasive actions — an average of about four per spacecraft per month.

There's no guarantee that every satellite operator is quite so responsible, however. Last week, for example, a satellite recently deployed by a Chinese rocket gave a Starlink spacecraft a close shave, apparently without providing the proper warning ahead of time.

"As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200-meter close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude. Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators — this needs to change," Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said via X on Dec. 12.

A new study finds that, with the immense quantity of satellites that hurtle in Earth's orbit today, the first smashup would occur in less than three days, potentially triggering a dangerous collision cascade that could quickly make space around the planet unusable.

The study, published on the online preprint repository arXiv, has not yet been peer-reviewed, the authors caution, but it raises questions about the sustainability of humanity's use of space. The researchers call this expected time-to-collision value the Crash Clock and calculated it by running a model of all known objects in space and determining an average collision rate for various orbital regions in the absence of avoidance maneuvers.

They found that regions in low Earth orbit (LEO) at altitudes around 300 miles (500 kilometers), where most satellites of megaconstellations like SpaceX's Starlink reside, could see a collision in as little as 2.8 days. For comparison, the team ran an identical simulation with numbers of satellites and space debris in orbit from 2018. At that time, it would have taken 128 days for the first collision to occur, Samantha Lawler, an associate professor in astronomy at the University of Regina in Canada and one of the paper's authors, told Space.com.

"It's been a big change since 2018," Lawler said.

The idea that satellites in orbit could suddenly lose their ability to avoid collisions is not science fiction. Every time the sun unleashes a coronal mass ejection (CME) — a burst of magnetized plasma — toward Earth, the planet's tenuous upper atmosphere thickens. Satellites in LEO then experience more drag and slow down, meaning their trajectories become impossible to predict.

In 2003, for example, after the Halloween storm — one of the most intense space weather events of the last three decades — satellite operators lost track of positions of their spacecraft for days. At that time, a few hundred operational satellites orbited the planet, and no collision occurred. And the Halloween storm was only a fraction of what the sun is capable of. A stronger solar storm, perhaps as potent as the Carrington Event of 1859 — the most intense recorded solar storm in human history — would take a week or more to fully subside.

"At the beginning of a solar storm, there's a huge increase in atmospheric density and things start to get pulled down," Sarah Thiele, an astrophysics researcher at Princeton University, and corresponding author of the paper, told Space.com. "Before things start getting back to normal, you have uncertainties of several kilometers in the positions of satellites, and it becomes impossible to estimate where objects are going to be in the future — and therefore it becomes impossible to predict collisions and conduct avoidance maneuvers."

The Crash Clock data suggests that, in 2018, near-Earth space would most likely have had enough time to recover from the most extreme solar storm before the first collision occurred. In 2025, however, an orbital smashup would be almost certain. Such a collision would create thousands of fragments that would threaten everything in their path, potentially triggering an unstoppable chain of events. With every subsequent crash, the affected orbital region would become more unsafe — a nightmare scenario known as the Kessler syndrome.

"2.8 days is the average expectation value for time to the first collision," Thiele said. "It's a probabilistic estimate. We're not saying that for sure this is going to happen in exactly that time. It's what you might expect."

Currently, some 13,000 functioning satellites orbit the planet, according to the European Space Agency, together with more than 43,500 pieces of space debris — defunct satellites, rocket stages and collision fragments — that are large enough to be tracked. These objects circle the planet at speeds of about 7.8 kilometers (4.8 miles) per second, and their paths frequently intersect. Space situational awareness companies, the U.S. Space Command and other agencies predict satellite trajectories and alert operators to perform collision-avoidance maneuvers in case of close approaches. Starlink, by far the currently largest constellation in orbit, encompassing around 9,000 functioning satellites, performed 145,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers in the six months prior to July 2025, equivalent to around four maneuvers per Starlink satellite every month.

The global space industry, however, is far from done with satellite constellation deployments. Analysts estimate that by 2035, tens of thousands more satellites might be added to Earth orbit. Things might therefore become much more treacherous in the not-so-distant future.

Lawler and Thiele declined to estimate how short the Crash Clock could be if there were perhaps six or 10 times as many satellites in Earth's orbit as there are today.

They say the satellite operators can, to a degree, improve their chances to survive solar mayhem by quickly de-orbiting old satellites and carefully considering how many spacecraft to launch to certain altitudes.

"The part that satellite operators can control is the number of satellites and the density of satellites," said Lawler.

Thiele added that the study highlights how fragile the space environment has become in a few short years.

"The Crash Clock demonstrates how reliant we are on errorless operations," she said. "If everything works as it's supposed to all the time, then we're okay."

Sooner or later, however, another Carrington-size solar storm will hit. Whether satellite operators will be ready for it remains a question. In 2025, the number of global space launches exceeded 300 for the first time in history, and the industry shows no signs of slowing down.

What is it?

Northern Ethiopia's Danakil (Afar) Depression, near where the Hayli Gubbi volcano is located, is considered one of the most volcanically active and geologically dynamic places on Earth. Here, the African and Arabian tectonic plates are slowly pulling apart, thinning Earth's crust and allowing magma to rise close to the surface. The region hosts a chain of shield volcanoes, broad mountains built by fluid magma, which includes Hayli Gubbi.

Because of its remoteness, volcanic activity in the Danakil region often goes undocumented. Estimates suggest its last major activity could have occurred thousands of years ago — or perhaps only centuries, a sign of how little this environment has been studied directly.

Where is it?

This image was taken in low Earth orbit above the Danakil region of Ethiopia.

Why is it amazing?

Because of its understudied status, Hayli Gubbi has no recorded eruptive history in the modern era. NASA's new satellite imagery now provides the first observational record of its activity, establishing a baseline for future monitoring and scientific analysis. Given the tectonic activity of the area, scientists can use Earth-observing satellites like Aqua to further study how plate tectonics affects Earth's volcanic activity, providing insights about these hard-to-reach areas.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about satellites and volcanoes.

The milestone came on a mission called Remora, a newly revealed collaboration between the companies Starfish Space and Impulse Space. One of Impulse Space's dishwasher-sized Mira orbital transfer vehicles used Starfish software to get within a mere 4,100 feet (1,250 meters) of another Mira, in a key demonstration of autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) tech.

"Together with our partners at Starfish, we brought this mission from concept to execution in less than a year," Impulse Space President and Chief Operating Officer Eric Romo said in a statement today (Dec. 15). "Our team is ready and able to execute quickly and deliver versatile, complex operations where success is paramount. We’re looking forward to more RPO missions across more orbits in the future."

That statement announced the existence of Remora and gave some key details about the mission, which Impulse and Starfish developed in just nine months.

It involved outfitting a Mira with a single, lightweight camera and Starfish's core guidance, navigation and control (GNC) software suite —two programs called Cetacean and Cephalopod, which ran on a peripheral flight computer.

The modified Mira launched in January 2025 on SpaceX's Transporter 12 rideshare mission, which hauled 131 payloads to low Earth orbit (LEO). This was the second Mira to reach orbit, as indicated by the name Impulse Space chose for its mission: LEO Express 2.

Mira conducted a number of operations on LEO Express 2; it deployed two cubesats, for example, and performed several precision engine burns to showcase the abilities of its propulsion system. And then, unbeknownst to the rest of us, it embarked on the Remora mission.

Using Cetacean and Cephalopod, the spacecraft rendezvoused autonomously with the first space-flown Mira, which launched on SpaceX's Transporter 9 flight in November 2023 and performed the LEO Express 1 mission.

The close approach occurred in late October over a period of several hours. Mira chronicled the operation with its onboard camera, and we get to see a few snapshots of the progress: Impulse and Starfish released photos showing the target Mira from a distance of 6.2 miles (10 kilometers), 4 miles (6.5 km), 1.2 miles (2 km) and 4,100 feet (1,250 m).

"With Remora, we set out to validate our unique approach to autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations in orbit," Starfish Space Co-Founder Trevor Bennett said in the same statement.

"Proving this capability is a major milestone for Starfish, and gives us tremendous confidence as we move toward our first Otter launches next year," he added.

Otter is a small, versatile vehicle that Starfish is developing to provide a variety of satellite-servicing functions, from inspection, refueling and repair to the de-orbiting of dead or dying craft.

Remora wasn't the first demonstration of Otter's planned capabilities. A trailblazer called Otter Pup 1 launched on SpaceX's Transporter 8 mission in June 2023.

Otter Pup 1 was supposed to rendezvous with the space tug that deployed it into orbit, but that parent vehicle experienced an anomaly that scuttled that plan. Starfish came up with a new idea, however, successfully maneuvering Otter Pup 1 within 0.6 miles (1 km) of a different space tug in April 2024.

And Otter Pup 2 launched this past June on SpaceX's Transporter 14, tasked with conducting the first-ever private satellite docking in LEO. So there may be some more news coming from Starfish in the not-too-distant future...

That bullet was one of the nine spacecraft that launched atop a Chinese Kinetica 1 rocket on Tuesday (Dec. 9) from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert. It zoomed dangerously close to a Starlink satellite, according to SpaceX, which was none too pleased with the close shave.

"As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200-meter close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude. Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators — this needs to change," Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said via X on Friday evening (Dec. 12).

Kinetica 1 is a 100-foot-tall (30 meters) solid-fuel rocket operated by CAS Space. The company, which is based in Guangzhou, responded to Nicolls' post, saying that it did its due diligence as the launch services provider (LSP) but is looking into the incident nonetheless.

"Our team is currently in contact for more details. All CAS Space launches select their launch windows using the ground-based space awareness system to avoid collisions with known satellites/debris. This is a mandatory procedure. We will work on identifying the exact details and provide assistance as the LSP," CAS Space said via X on Friday night.

"If confirmed, this incident occurred nearly 48 hours after payload separation, by which time the launch mission had long concluded. CAS Space will coordinate with satellite operators to proceed. This calls for re-establishing collaborations between the two New Space ecosystems," the company added in another X post a few hours later.

Tuesday's Kinetica 1 launch lofted "six Chinese multifunctional satellites, an Earth-observation satellite for the UAE [United Arab Emirates}, a scientific satellite for Egypt and an educational satellite for Nepal," according to China Daily. Nicolls' post did not specify which of these spacecraft zoomed close to the Starlink satellite.

The coordination that Nicolls cited is becoming more and more important, for Earth orbit is getting more and more crowded. In 2020, for example, fewer than 3,400 functional satellites were whizzing around our planet. Just five years later, that number has soared to about 13,000, and more spacecraft are going up all the time.

Most of them belong to SpaceX. The company currently operates nearly 9,300 Starlink satellites, more than 3,000 of which have launched this year alone.

Starlink satellites avoid potential collisions autonomously, maneuvering themselves away from conjunctions predicted by available tracking data. And this sort of evasive action is quite common: Starlink spacecraft performed about 145,000 avoidance maneuvers in the first six months of 2025, which works out to around four maneuvers per satellite per month.

That's an impressive record. But many other spacecraft aren't quite so capable, and even Starlink satellites can be blindsided by spacecraft whose operators don't share their trajectory data, as Nicolls noted.

And even a single collision — between two satellites, or involving pieces of space junk, which are plentiful in Earth orbit as well — could spawn a huge cloud of debris, which could cause further collisions. Indeed, the nightmare scenario, known as the Kessler syndrome, is a debris cascade that makes it difficult or impossible to operate satellites in parts of the final frontier.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:05 a.m. ET on Dec. 13 to include another X post by CAS Space.

Roughly 15,000 satellites currently circle the planet in vast internet-providing fleets, more than half of them belonging to SpaceX's Starlink network, which has more than 9,000 spacecraft in orbit. In 2023, astronomers reported that some of these satellites were already photobombing images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, as sunlight glinted off their surfaces leaving bright trails that erase, obscure or mimic genuine cosmic signals.

If every constellation currently filed with regulators were approved and launched, Earth will be encircled by half a million satellites by the end of the 2030s.

"The natural question that comes up is: how many more space telescopes will be affected when all these constellations are launched?" study co-author Alejandro Borlaff, an astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Space.com. "This work is the first careful quantification of a potential problem."

Borlaff and his team modeled how future satellite megaconstellations would appear to four space telescopes: Two already operating ones — Hubble and NASA's SPHEREx (short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer), launched in March — and two planned observatories, China's Xuntian telescope, scheduled for a 2026 liftoff, and the European Space Agency's ARRAKIHS mission, expected to launch next decade.

Using orbital data for every registered constellation from the Planet4589 database maintained by astronomer Jonathan McDowell, the researchers simulated roughly 18 months of telescope operations under varying scenarios that ranged from 100 satellites to one million.

If the 560,000 satellites currently planned are deployed, the team found that one in every three Hubble images would contain at least one satellite trail. For SPHEREx, ARRAKIHS, and Xuntian, more than 96% of exposures would be affected. At the million-satellite level, roughly the number of proposals currently pending, contamination rates roughly double, the study reports.

These findings are "truly frightening," Patrick Seitzer, an astronomer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who was not involved in the new study, told Nature. "This is a very important study for the future of space-based astronomy."

Until 2019, the largest commercial constellation, Iridium, operated just 75 satellites in low Earth orbit. Since then, a dramatic reduction in launch costs and the rise of rideshare missions have driven an exponential surge in deployment. The arrival of super-heavy rockets such as SpaceX's Starship, Blue Origin's New Glenn and China's Long March 9 is likely to make large-scale launches even easier, the study notes.

Crucially, image processing cannot fully recover the science lost to satellite contamination, the researchers emphasize. Techniques such as masking can hide a streak, but the cosmic signal underneath cannot be reconstructed.

"That part of the image will be forever lost," Borlaff told Space.com. Photon noise from reflected sunlight wipes out the original data, and no software, AI included, can reconstruct that data, he said, "simply because the information that came from space to the telescope detector is no longer there."

Not everyone agrees with every aspect of the team's modeling. Rafael Guzmán, consortium lead for ARRAKIHS, told Science that while his group shares the serious concern most astronomers have regarding the effects of megaconstellations, the study assumes ARRAKIHS will survey the entire sky, when it will mostly point away from Earth, where satellites are least visible. His team similarly concludes that around 96% of images would bear satellite trails, but a smaller portion of each image would be contaminated, according to the Science story.

One mitigation strategy proposed in the study is placing large satellite constellations below the altitude of space telescopes, where spacecraft spend more time in Earth's shadow and therefore appear dimmer. But Borlaff acknowledges this could increase satellites in lower orbits burn up more frequently due to atmospheric drag, and recent research suggests that materials released during reentry may harm the ozone layer. Lower orbits also make satellites appear brighter to ground-based observatories, potentially shifting the problem rather than solving it.

"This should be discussed from a multi-disciplinary perspective, not just from astronomy," said Borlaff. "We need to carefully evaluate the resources that we have so we can maintain an orbital environment that is useful for both science and industry."

The study notes that efforts to measure the environmental and scientific impacts of megaconstellations are already struggling to keep pace with launch activity, a dynamic reminiscent of the early days of ozone-layer research, when scientists' warnings about chlorofluorocarbons raced against industrial expansion until the historic Montreal Protocol imposed global limits.

When asked whether he is optimistic that meaningful mitigation is possible, Borlaff described himself as an "optimistic pessimist."

"Our results show what will happen if no action is taken, but I am positive that won't be the case," he said.

What is it?

Using a high-energy X-ray system, they turned the satellite effectively transparent, revealing fuel and gas tanks, hidden residues of cleaning solutions, and the modular skeleton that once held 15 scientific instruments steady in orbit. It’s the kind of "full-body scan" that, until now, has mostly been reserved for people, not hardware that's been to space and back.

X-rays are already the quiet workhorses of modern life, from hospital radiology to airport security scanners and industrial non-destructive testing. They are invaluable when you need to see inside something without destroying it. In engineering, this often means looking for cracks or voids in aircraft components, checking welds, or inspecting complex assemblies. The recent test with EURECA, published in the October issue of the journal Acta Astronautica takes that same principle and scales it up to an entire flown satellite. It shows not only that such a scan is possible, but that it can reveal details that matter for the future of reusable space hardware.

Where is it?

This image was taken in the laboratory of the Empa Center for X-ray Analytics in Dübendorf, Germany.

Why is it amazing?

This X-ray study exposed what time and stress have done to the spacecraft. The researchers found cracks in some of EURECA's composite struts, as well as fractures and deformations in several scientific instruments that remained on board. Some of that damage could have occurred during the violent minutes of launch, as the satellite endured vibrations and acceleration. Other defects may have built up slowly during months in orbit, where EURECA was exposed to strong radiation, large temperature swings between sunlight and shadow, and tiny impacts from micrometeoroids and debris. Reentry and landing add yet another phase of stress. X-rays alone cannot say exactly when each crack formed, but they show clearly where the structure is most vulnerable.

The timing of this research is key, as the number of active satellites in Earth orbit has now exceeded 10,000, with thousands more being launched each year. On top of that, there are decades' worth of spent rocket stages, dead satellites, and fragments from collisions and explosions. This cloud of space debris poses risks to functioning satellites and to crewed missions. One proposed part of the solution is greater reusability, spacecraft and upper stages that can survive, return, and fly again, rather than becoming junk after a single use.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about space junk and satellites orbiting Earth.

Before Sunday, the volcano's last known eruption roughly coincided with the beginning of our current Holocene Epoch, when the last ice age came to close after 2.6 million years.

No deaths have been reported from Hayli Gubbi's eruption, but villages located in the remote district of Afdera became caked in ash, impacting both homes and livestock, AP reports.

Abedella Mussa, a health official for the Afdera district, told AP that mobile medicinal services were dispatched from the Afar region to help the kebeles (neighborhoods) impacted by the eruption.

The massive clouds of ash that erupted 8.7 miles (14 km) into the sky drifted to Pakistan and Northern India, causing flight cancellations for a few days during the week, and began moving toward China.

Atalay Ayele, a seismologist and researcher at the Institute of Geophysics, Space Science and Astronomy at Addis Ababa University, told Reuters that Ethiopia is home to about 50 active volcanoes.

"At any time, these volcanoes can be active or can show manifestations of activity," Ayele said in the Reuters report.

While there were no scientific forecasts for the event, locals told Al Jazeera reporters that they had noticed a little smoke coming from Hayli Gubbi in the days leading up to the eruption.

Hayli Gubbi's eruption isn’t the first time Ethiopia has seen volcanic activity this year. Erta Ale volcano in the Afar region, known for decades of continuous volcanic activity that has created an ongoing lava lake, saw reports of a dense black cloud rising from the volcano in mid-July 2025.

Hayli Gubbi’s activity this week has reportedly ceased as of Friday (Nov. 28).

SpaceX scrubbed the planned launch of 140 satellites, all aboard the same Falcon 9 rocket, just over 15 minutes before their planned liftoff from a seaside pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The company did not disclose a reason for the delay. The next opportunity to launch the mission, called Transporter-15, will be Friday (Nov. 28), at 1:19 p.m. EST (1819 GMT).

"There are a thousand ways that a launch can go wrong and only one way that it can go right," a SpaceX spokesperson said during live launch commentary. "So, given that, we are overly cautious on the ground, and if the team or the vehicle sees anything that looks even slightly off, we'll stop the countdown."

Transporter-15 is a SpaceX rideshare mission designed to carry dozens of small satellites into orbit for a variety of customers. SpaceX initially hoped to launch the mission on Nov. 19, but has seen repeated delays for the flight.

The satellites riding aboard the Falcon 9 are an ecclectic mix of commercial satellites, Earth-observation spacecraft and other vehicles. The Earth imaging company Planet Labs, for example, has 36 small "SuperDove" satellites riding alongside two of its larger Pelican Earth-observation satellites. The European Space Agency, meanwhile, has a pair of HydryoGNSS satellites on board to monitor Earth's water cycle.

Two launch providers, ExoLaunch and SEOPS, each have a collection of different spacecraft aboard Transporter-15 for various clients. Varda, a company that launches experiments that can return to Earth on reentry capsules, will fly its fifth spacecraft, called W-5, on the mission. And there are dozens of other satellites representing companies from around the world, including Taiwan and Italy.

The Falcon 9 rocket on Transporter-15 includes a first stage that has flown 29 times before. If all goes well, the first stage will return to Earth after liftoff to land on SpaceX's drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You" in the Pacific Ocean so it can be returned to shore for eventual reuse.

Satellites come in all shapes and sizes, each designed for a specific mission. Some monitor weather patterns and natural disasters, others beam your favorite shows to your living room, and a few even help scientists unlock the secrets of the universe.

But how much do you really know about their history, technology, and impact on our daily lives?

Whether you're a space enthusiast or just curious about the wonders above, this quiz will test your knowledge of the machines that keep watch over Earth and beyond.

Try it out below and see how well you score!

High-altitude platform stations, or HAPS, have been around for a while, but the technology hasn't fully taken off yet. Google spent 10 years trying to develop balloons that would hover in the stratosphere above remote rural areas and beam internet to residents but abandoned that project, called Loon, in 2021, concluding that it couldn't be made sustainable.

Four years later, companies such as World Mobile Stratospheric and Sceye say they are on the verge of making internet-beaming from the stratosphere, the layer of Earth's atmosphere roughly 6 miles to 31 miles (10 to 50 kilometers) above the planet, a reality. Moreover, they claim that their offerings will be better and cheaper than that of satellite megaconstellations in low Earth orbit (LEO), which too have been developed with the promise of connecting the world's unconnected.

Richard Deakin, the CEO of World Mobile Stratospheric, said HAPS have failed to make it so far because they couldn't support power-hungry antennas needed to beam down high-bandwidth internet across vast swaths of land. Previously-tested high-altitude balloons and airships have relied on photovoltaics to generate power, which only provide "a couple of hundred watts," according to Deakin.

He said that his company's HAPS, an autonomous plane called the Stratomast, will be powered by liquid hydrogen, allowing it not only to hover for six days at an altitude of 60,000 feet (18 km), but also generate enough electricity to support a 10-by-10-foot (3 by 3 meters) phased-array antenna that could connect 500,000 users on Earth at the same time. After six days, a new aircraft would arrive to take over the service while the first returns to the base for refuelling.

Deakin says users will get 200 megabits per second (Mbps) of connectivity directly into their smartphones from Stratomast. That would be a vast improvement over Starlink's current direct-to-device offering of 17 Mbps, which is currently only capable of supporting emergency text messaging. Even AST SpaceMobile, which is building a constellation of giant orbiting antennas to beam internet directly to smartphone devices, can sustain only about 21 Mbps.

"When the Stratomast is flying, all these old satellites are going to be in museums," Deakin said.

The 4-metric-ton (4.4 tons) Stratomast aircraft, made of lightweight carbon fiber, has a 184-foot (56 m) wingspan, equivalent to that of a 120-metric-ton (132 tons) Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane. A single Stratomast will cover an area of 6,000 square miles (15,000 square km). Such a wide reach means that the whole of Scotland could be covered with just nine Stratomast platforms, Deakin said. World Mobile Stratospheric estimates the cost of running such a system would be around just £40 million ($52 million US) per year, allowing the company to provide 200 Mbps of internet connectivity to Scotland's 5.5 million inhabitants at a cost at about 60 pence per person per month.

"That's enough for TV, computer broadband, the whole thing…,"Gregory Gottlieb, the head of aerial platforms at World Mobile, told Space.com.

In comparison, the cheapest Starlink subscription, only covering areas with low demand, currently costs $40 a month. And price is only one of the drawbacks of LEO satellite internet. To be able to connect to Starlink satellites, users need dedicated terminals. Although Starlink's downlink speeds reach up to 250 Mbps, the bandwidth gets diluted as the number of users grows. For example, troops on the frontline in eastern Ukraine complain that Starlink bandwidth limits the use of ground robots, as most terminals there only get about 10 Mbps.

"There really isn't any satellite constellation that can serve more than one person per square kilometer [0.4 square miles]," Mikkel Frandsen, the founder and CEO of another HAPS developer, New Mexico-based Sceye, told Space.com. "That's kind of the upper end."

Sceye, founded in 2014, has developed an airship-like HAPS powered by solar energy, which has already completed several successful test flights. In August last year, the Sceye airship became the first stratospheric platform that successfully survived a night in the stratosphere without sinking after sunset and remained in a required position above a fixed spot on Earth. The problem of drift and difficulties with station-keeping were among the issues that led to the demise of the Google Loon project, according to Frandsen.

In June, Sceye received a "strategic investment" from Japanese telecommunications operator SoftBank, which hopes the technology will allow it to provide next-generation connectivity to users even in the most underserved areas. Sceye also recently won a contract from NASA to host Earth-observation payloads.

Frandsen said that Sceye doesn't want to compete with satellite internet providers but thinks that megaconstellations, even when fully deployed, will not be able to satisfy the world's need for connectivity.

"All satellite constellations, when they're combined, will not do anything other than [make] a little dent in the global demand for connectivity," he said. "They're going to do fine business at the prices they're charging, but they're not going to serve billions of people. Space isn't all that scalable. They're going to serve millions of people."

LEO satellite megaconstellations such as SpaceX's Starlink orbit a few hundred kilometers above Earth's surface. In the past five years, they have replaced distant geostationary satellites, which orbit 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above Earth, as the dominant technology for delivering internet connectivity from space. But the growth in the number of satellites concerns space sustainability experts. The more objects hurtling around the planet, the higher the risk of collisions that could pollute near-Earth space with thousands of dangerous fragments. Moreover, atmospheric physicists worry about the growing amount of metal being burned up in the atmosphere during satellite reentries.

"HAPS are a really interesting domain because I think, in many ways, they cover the best of terrestrial and the best of satellite — high-altitude systems without suffering from the drawbacks," said Deakin.

Gottlieb said that HAPS could provide a convenient, flexible and easily replaceable alternative to satellite internet at times of growing geopolitical tensions.

"There is a view that, within 24 hours of any major conflict, low Earth orbit would be unusable for military purposes," Gottlieb said. "We can deploy aircraft at very short notice. We can be agile in terms of spectrum that we're using, and all sorts of different boxes that can go onto our platforms."

Deakin's team has been developing Stratomast since 2019 as part of a collaboration with German telecommunications provider Deutsche Telecom. During tests in Germany and Saudi Arabia, they demonstrated the workings of their novel antenna technology.

Earlier this year, the company was acquired by the U.S.-based telecom provider World Mobile. The company recently partnered with Indonesian telecommunications provider Protelindo to get Stratomast off the ground. The partnership plans to conduct flight tests with their antenna at a lower altitude next summer and hopes to begin stratospheric test flights in 2027.

Sceye, in the meantime, is working on increasing the endurance of its airship and hopes to commence commercial service in 2027.

What is it?

Antarctic sea ice plays a critical role in Earth’s climate and ecosystems, and understanding its variability is essential for interpreting broader environmental changes. Unlike the Arctic, which is an ocean surrounded by land, Antarctica is a continent surrounded by open ocean.

This geographic contrast allows Antarctic sea ice to expand freely during winter and retreat dramatically in summer, creating one of the most dynamic seasonal ice cycles on the planet. Sea ice in this region regulates climate by reflecting sunlight back into space, influences ocean circulation through the freezing and melting of saltwater, and helps shape weather patterns across the Southern Hemisphere. It also supports a rich ecosystem in which species such as penguins, seals, seabirds, and krill depend on predictable ice conditions for feeding and breeding.

Where is it?

This image was created using satellite data captured from low Earth orbit.

Why is it amazing?

For many years, Antarctic sea ice did not exhibit the long-term decline seen in the Arctic and instead fluctuated around or above average levels. However, that pattern shifted abruptly after 2016, when successive years began to show historically low extents in both winter and summer.

Now, satellite measurements show that the ice expanded to just 6.88 million square miles (17.81 million square kilometers) this southern winter, making it the third-lowest winter maximum in the 47-year satellite record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. This year’s peak fell nearly 348,000 square miles (900,000 square km) below the 1981–2010 average, continuing a post-2016 pattern of unusually low sea ice.

Despite these clear departures from previous decades, researchers caution that the Antarctic climate system is highly complex, making it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about long-term change. Ocean temperatures, atmospheric circulation, wind patterns and natural climate variability all interact in ways that can influence seasonal ice formation.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about climate change and Earth-observing satellites.

SpaceX's workhorse rocket soared into space from the California coast after more than a week of delays, carrying more than 100 spacecraft to orbit before making a landing at sea.

The veteran Falcon 9 rocket launched SpaceX's Transporter-15 rideshare mission Friday (Nov. 28) from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Liftoff occurred at about 1:45 p.m. EST (1845 GMT) from Vandenberg's Space Launch Complex-4E, about a half hour into a 57-minute window. The mission had been delayed since Nov. 19, with SpaceX calling off a launch attempt on Wednesday, just 15 minutes before liftoff.

Transporter-15 should take just over 2.5 hours to deploy all of its 140 satellites into a sun-synchronous orbit, where each will begin its own, individualized mission. The first-stage booster's flight, meanwhile, took just over 8 minutes,

The mission continues SpaceX's increasing frequency of rideshare launches, and follows on the heels of the late-summer liftoff of the Transporter-14 flight, which delivered dozens of cubesats, tech demos and research craft into low Earth orbit (LEO).

Not all of Transporter-15's payloads were confirmed or identified before launch. But among those that were we found notable contributions from organizations like the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Taiwan Space Agency (TASA), as well as companies and organizations like Planet Labs, SEOPS, Leaf Space and various universities and educational institutions.

ESA's HydroGNSS-1 and HydroGNSS-2 satellites are flying as part of the agency's first Scout mission. They will study Earth's water cycle using the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) reflectometry measurement technique to quite literally "scout for water," according to ESA.

Taiwan launched its FORMOSAT-8A Earth-imaging satellite, as well as three domestically built cubesats: Bellbird-1, Black Kite-1 and TORO-8U-1, from Tron Future Tech, Rapidtek Technologies Inc. and Pyras Technology Inc., respectively. They are designed to test high-speed data transferal communications, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and conduct remote sensing to monitor algae, plankton and ocean health.

The Pelican imaging satellites 5 and 6, as well as 36 SuperDoves in the "Flock 4H" group, all built by the California-based firm Planet Labs, are also riding on the Transporter-15 mission. Planet Labs' expanding Earth-observation Pelican network is designed to "efficiently capture fleeting and emerging events, especially those that may anticipate new patterns or risks," the company's website says. The accompanying SuperDoves will join Planet Labs' PlanetScope monitoring mission.

SEOPS is using the Transporter-15 flight to demonstrate its custom payload integration capabilities with the deployment of a wide range of student-built, scientific and commercial spacecraft. Those vehicles include four payloads managed by Alba Orbital. Also flying is Hungary's HUNITY, a new "pocketqube" platform for even smaller cubesats, measuring as small as 2 inches (5 centimeters). Two of these pocketqubes are SARI-1 and SARI-2 from the Saudi space agency, which will perform telemetry, IoT experiments and other research. Alba is also flying the ANISCSAT mission from Azerbaijan, which will study environmental conditions in LEO.

SEOPS is managing two cubesats for CS3, called WISDOM and Mauve. WISDOM, part of ESA’s NAVISP program, will test collision avoidance and deorbiting technologies using a 6U cubesat that will separate into two individual 3U spacecraft, while Mauve, a 16U cubesat, will conduct ultraviolet astronomy using a 13-cm telescope.

SEOPS is also handling NASA’s 3UCubed-A, designed to measure precipitating electrons and ultraviolet emissions at Earth's poles, SatRev's PW-6U Earth-imaging satellite for customers in the agricultural and energy industries, and TRYAD-1 and 2, lightning observation satellites built by students at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and Auburn University, and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

A large portion of the satellites on Transporter-15 will be supported by Leaf Space. In a demonstration of its growing ground infrastructure, the Italian company will add 31 of Transporter-15's payloads to its Leaf Line ground station network — roughly 30% of the launch's total spacecraft. Those 31 will join 140 spacecraft that utilize the network, operated by various commercial customers who rely on Leaf Space for tracking and telemetry data.

You can see a full list of the 140 satellites on Transporter-15 on SpaceX's mission website.

Due to the large number of payloads and the diversity of their missions, the Falcon 9's second stage will feature a longer-than-usual deployment process, beginning about 55 minutes after launch and lasting about 2 hours and 43 minutes.

SpaceX's Transporter-15 mission is the 30th flight for the first-stage booster (called B1071), which has previously launched 18 Starlink missions, four rideshare missions, five national security missions and two missions carrying Earth-observation satellites.

The mission also appeared to be a reflight of the payload fairing, the clamshell-like nose cone protecting the satellite payload. The fairing appeared weathered from past flights much like the first-stage booster. SpaceX said the company planned to retrieve the fairing halves from the sea to recover and reuse them.

"Those fairings will make their way back to Earth for recovery," a SpaceX spokesperson said during live launch commentary.

Editor's note: This story was updated on Nov. 28 to include new photos and confirmation of SpaceX's successful Transporter-15 launch.

While satellites in orbit are carried around Earth by the pull of the planet's gravity, the momentum of their initial deployment and controlled propulsion, it is also necessary to adjust which way a satellite is facing. This allows instruments to point in the right direction, helps manage the thermal effects of solar radiation, and makes repositioning the satellite possible when needed.

To do this, you must adjust a satellite's attitude, the technical name for an object's orientation relative to its inertial frame of reference. Essentially, we're talking about rotating the satellite "horizontally" while it is moving.

Normally, these maneuvers are handled by human operators directing the satellite remotely or by programmed software routines. Both methods take considerable time and expense, and they don't account for every possible circumstance, especially ones that engineers fail to predict ahead of time.

Fortunately, researchers at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Germany have developed — and demonstrated — an AI system that can change the attitude of an orbiting satellite without any human input, showing that autonomous control of satellites in a real-space environment is possible.

Successful tests in orbit demonstrate what's possible

The project, called the In-Orbit Demonstrator for Learning Attitude Control (LeLaR), uses a type of machine-learning process called deep reinforcement learning to "teach" the satellite's flight control software how and when to adjust its own attitude when required. Rather than spending months or years programming a satellite's behavior directly, with this method, engineers can train the satellite to effectively program itself to do the same thing, a much faster and cheaper process.

The researchers developed the AI model in a lab at JMU, using a "high-fidelity" simulator to train the model before uploading it to the flight controller of the InnoCube nanosatellite, currently in low Earth orbit.

The initial test, carried out during a satellite pass on Oct. 30, involved setting a target attitude for the satellite and letting the controller adjust itself to match. Using mechanical reaction wheels controlled by the new system, the satellite adjusted itself to the desired orientation on its own, a feat the JMU team repeated on several subsequent passes.

"This successful test marks a major step forward in the development of future satellite control systems," Tom Baumann, a JMU research assistant in aerospace information technology and LeLar team member, said in a JMU statement. "It shows that AI can not only perform in simulation but also execute precise, autonomous maneuvers under real conditions."

Increased use of AI automation in satellites

While the JMU team's demonstration might be the first time a satellite controlled its own orientation in orbit, it isn't the first use of AI systems to improve and automate important satellite functions.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory successfully used an automated AI system to perform "dynamic targeting" of a satellite's ground-facing camera to avoid cloud cover, and after successful lab tests, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory is working to deploy its Autosat system, which will let a satellite calibrate its own signal as well as send and receive data autonomously. Researchers at the University of California, Davis and Proteus Space are also preparing to launch a satellite in the coming months that can autonomously monitor the health of its own systems, freeing up engineers for other tasks

None of those systems actually controlled the motion of the actual satellite, however, and this new approach to satellite flight control could pave the way for simpler and more efficient satellite development, reducing costs and speeding up deployments.

"It's a major step towards full autonomy in space," said Professor Sergio Montenegro, a LeLaR team member at JMU. "We are at the beginning of a new class of satellite control systems: intelligent, adaptive and self-learning."

Charged particles hurled toward Earth from the sun can trigger geomagnetic storms that light up the sky with brilliant northern lights, but they can also quietly interfere with the satellites and GPS signals our modern world relies on. Space weather can ground airline flights, cancel rocket launches, distort radio signals, confuse navigation systems, and, as in May 2024, even cause farmers' tractors to act like they are demon-possessed.

For a majority of us, a GPS hiccup is just a momentary annoyance. But for farmers in the southeastern United States, a poorly timed outage can mean huge financial losses and lost harvests, especially for one major crop: peanuts. The risk became very real on May 10, 2024, when the first G5 geomagnetic storm in over 20 years, known as the Gannon Storm, triggered incredible auroras and caused GPS-guided tractors in the U.S. to veer off course. Farmers reported issues with their autoguidance systems, including jolting, freezing, and steering problems. For peanut growers, who rely on ultra-precise GPS to plant and harvest their crop from belowground, the timing couldn't have been worse.

Agricultural economist Terry Griffin, based in Kansas, has been studying what happens when solar storms collide with agriculture. His latest research, currently under peer review, reveals just how much a major space weather event can cost and why peanuts are so vulnerable.

Why peanuts are a special kind of GPS problem

Many crops now depend on satellite navigation, but peanuts are particularly reliant. Once the peanut plant canopy grows, the peanuts are hidden underground and farmers can't see where the rows are anymore.

That's why peanut farming depends so heavily on RTK GPS (real-time kinematic GPS), which provides sub-centimeter accuracy and crucially, preserves that accuracy months later.

"It's imperative that we measure the planting progress, or the planting path with RTK GPS," Griffin told Space.com in an interview. "Sub-centimeter accuracy is really important and RTK provides us that accuracy months or even years later."

If RTK signals degrade during planting or digging, farmers can't follow rows they cannot see, and yields take a hit.

"If we do not have our RTK GPS, we're going to lose at least 11% of production by just leaving nuts in the ground," Griffin said.

When Gannon Storm hit Earth, it did so at a crucial time of the year for U.S. agriculture. It struck during peak planting season.

"When May 2024 rolled around, we had this G5 storm, it was a perfect storm," said Griffin. "The Gannon Storm happened at the perfect time to be a big deal. If it had happened a month earlier, it wouldn't have been a big deal. So, timing of the year is really important."

The million-dollar choice: Keep planting or wait?

When Global Navigation Satellite System (GNNS) outages strike, peanut farmers face two costly options: continue planting without RTK, but risk misaligned digging months later and an 11% yield penalty; or stop planting and wait, but risk a 'biological penalty' as the crop loses precious growing time. Peanuts, like most plants, need a certain amount of warmth, called the 'heat-unit accumulation,' to move through their growth stages and produce high-quality fruit. "We only plant a few weeks in the year, and if we delay a week early on in the season, it's not a big deal, but if we delay that week later in the season, it is a big deal," Griffin said.

Griffin's modeling shows that mistimed decisions during GPS outages, such as farmers planting when they should wait or waiting when they should plant, could put over $100 million worth of peanut production at risk across the southeastern U.S. In the worst-case timing scenarios, nearly 262 kilotons (577 million pounds or 262 million kg) of peanuts destined for human consumption could be lost.

The need for 'duration nowcasts'

Right now, farmers rarely know whether a GPS outage is going to last two hours or two days. That uncertainty forces farmers to resort back to their default, which may be to continue or it may be to wait; each producer is different.

Griffin proposes a new kind of forecast: duration "nowcasts," which will provide short-term predictions telling farmers how long RTK-level GPS will be unavailable.

"If we have an ongoing RTK GPS outage, it may help us answer the question, 'how long will this outage last?'" Griffin said. "It would inform them of what their best decision is and it would have tremendous value for that peanut farmer."

Griffin's analysis showed that waiting was the optimal decision early in the planting window, while continuing with operations was favored later. According to his estimates, the accuracy of space weather nowcasts could be worth $20 million annually for Georgia alone, and $33 million for the broader U.S. Southeast, roughly 5% of total peanut crop value, and more than double the economic value typically attributed to terrestrial weather forecasts.

Farmers check weather forecast apps constantly, Griffin noted, which is why he believes space weather alerts should be delivered through the tools they already rely on.

"Farmers religiously look at the weather apps all the time … So piggybacking with two types of weather makes a lot of sense," Griffin said.

He added that it would also be useful to have an in-cab warning system in tractors and other equipment consisting of a simple alert that tells farmers when their GPS signal isn't trustworthy.

The turning point

The May 2024 Gannon Storm marked a turning point for agriculture. As Griffin puts it, "May 9 was a different world than on May 11. On May 11, the awareness dramatically increased." Before that weekend, the idea of a widespread GPS outage sounded far-fetched to many. Griffin remembers presenting the scenario at a conference, "the crowd sort of giggled, like you know, this is never going to happen."

The May storm also revealed something deeper, as this was the first time modern agriculture had ever truly experienced a strong solar storm. High-precision GPS wasn't widely used on farms until the end of Solar Cycle 23, and the following Solar Cycle 24 brought about almost no major disturbances. That meant the U.S. had never seen what a severe geomagnetic storm could two to two-thirds of the nation's planted acres that now rely on satellite navigation. All that changed in Solar Cycle 25. The May 2024 event, the strongest geomagnetic storm in over 20 years, became the first real-world test of how space weather affects GPS-guided planting, digging and harvesting.

For Griffin, the next step is preparation. Compared with terrestrial weather, "we know very little about space weather", he said, and many farmers had never even heard the term until their tractors began acting up. But with new satellites such as NOAA's SWFO-L1 satellite observatory, along with NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) and Carruthers Geocorona Observatory set to improve monitoring and forecasts, scientists hope to deliver something agriculture has never had before: clear, actionable guidance on how long a GPS outage will last and what farmers can do.

"If we can make forecasts that are usable for end users, that's going to be a huge step forward," Griffin said.

When the researchers decided to put satellite communications under scrutiny, they thought they would find some flaws. What they discovered was much worse than their wildest dreams. Using a commercial off-the-shelf satellite dish mounted on the roof of a university campus in San Diego, they scanned internet traffic routed via 39 geostationary satellites visible from southern California.

They soon realized that sensitive messages including those involving critical infrastructure and internal corporate and government communications were broadcast via those satellites completely unprotected. The experiment could be easily replicated by hackers using commercially available equipment, the researchers warn, saying the results were "as bad as one could hope."

"A shockingly large amount of sensitive traffic is being broadcast unencrypted, including critical infrastructure, internal corporate and government communications, private citizens' voice calls and SMS, and consumer Internet traffic from in-flight wifi and mobile networks," the researchers wrote in a statement. "This data can be passively observed by anyone with a few hundred dollars of consumer-grade hardware."

It turns out that many of these satellites are using outdated equipment, the researchers say. "Geostationary satellites are a somewhat older technology so our expectation was that they will be using some older, outdated cryptography," Dave Levin, an associate professor in computer science at the University of Maryland who led the research, told Space.com. "So, we thought we would try to listen and then see whether we could break this cryptography. It turned out we didn't have to because the cryptography wasn't used at all in large part."

Geostationary satellites orbit Earth at a distance of 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers). At this distance, the orbital velocity of a satellite matches the speed of Earth's rotation. As a result, the satellite appears suspended above a fixed spot on the equator, having a stable view of a large portion of the globe.

Before the advent of low-Earth-orbit internet-beaming megaconstellations such as SpaceX's Starlink, geostationary satellites were the dominant solution for satellite communications. They are still widely used today, including for military purposes. The satellites scrutinized in the new study make up only about 15 percent of the world's entire geostationary fleet, Wenyi "Morty" Zhang, a PhD researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author of the study, told Space.com. He thinks the scope of the problem is likely much worse.

Levin said that what the team found was "as bad as one could hope." The researchers could listen to private phone calls, read text messages, but also see sensitive traffic transmitted by companies and government and military organizations. Data of passengers using in-flight WIFI provided onboard of commercial airliners were also easily visible.

"There were way more things in the clear than we had anticipated," Levin added. "Moreover, there were also more sensitive things than we had anticipated."

Zhang said the transmissions included messages sent by Mexican military and the police, and even some communications by the U.S. Government.

"It was quite shocking to us," said Zhang, who built the eavesdropping antenna and led the technical side of the project. The entire set-up, he said, cost a few hundred dollars and consisted of commercially available equipment.

The complete absence of encryption of the satellite links was only one part of the problem, added Levin. Hundreds of companies, frequently unaware of the workings of satellite communications systems, were sending their data via those satellites without end-to-end encryption, which is a standard in today's secure internet communication.

Data being transmitted by hundreds of companies including mobile telephone operator T-Mobile were thus in plain sight of the researchers. The team has not yet disclosed the names of all the affected companies. They are bound by responsible disclosure rules that require them to give the affected parties time to fix the problems before making their issues public, but they stated that millions of users have been made vulnerable through the complete lack of encryption.

The researchers spent mere days investigating each of the satellites. Still, the amount of intercepted communications was mind-boggling. A dedicated attacker could easily harvest even more data. And in addition to gathering sensitive information, attackers could find many ways to actively exploit those vulnerabilities.

"Just from being able to see people's text messages, you might be able to get their two-factor authentication codes and then log into systems as them," said Levin. "But an adversary could step up to another level and begin interjecting their own messages. They could, for example, try to interfere with critical infrastructure."

Levin added that although the affected companies first didn't want to believe they had a problem of such a scope at their hands, they all responded "positively" and in many cases were not even aware how much of their data was transmitted via satellites.

The research was presented in the Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference and is available online.

"For years, if we had a conjunction, we would send a note to the Chinese saying, 'We think we're going to run into you. You hold still, we'll maneuver around you,'" Alvin Drew, director for NASA Space Sustainability, said during a plenary session at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, Australia, on Oct. 2.

A big shift had come a day earlier, Drew revealed. "Just yesterday, we had a bit of a celebration because, for the first time, the Chinese National Space Agency reached out to us and said, 'We see a conjunction amongst our satellites. We recommend you hold still. We'll do the maneuver.' And that's the first time that's ever happened," Drew said.

The move by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) comes as both the United States, notably through SpaceX's commercial Starlink constellation, and China, in the shape of the Guowang and Thousand Sails megaconstellations, are rapidly increasing the number of satellites they have in orbit. This means an increasing need for satellite operators to coordinate to limit the chances of collisions between satellites and prevent events that cause new clouds of space debris.

The development also indirectly suggests that China's space situational awareness, or understanding what is going on in orbit at any moment, has reached the level of being able to flag conjunctions and begin to coordinate with other operators.

China noted this as a priority in a 2022 space white paper that outlined its ambitions for the period 2021 to 2026. The country also recently stated that it is working on capabilities to remove junk from space.

Contact between CNSA and NASA is generally limited by the so-called Wolf Amendment, which prevents most bilateral interaction between NASA and Chinese state entities.

HEO, also known as HEO Robotics, has made a splash with sensational images of spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO) that were taken by other spacecraft, or "non-Earth imaging" (NEI). Prominent examples include closeups of the International Space Station (ISS) and China's Tiangong space station, as well as photos of the European Space Agency's ERS-2 satellite as it tumbled into Earth's atmosphere in February 2024. Such images are taken during calculated close approaches to spacecraft of interest by partner satellites.

While these photos are striking, clients can also obtain images they need for anomaly detection, operational awareness and risk mitigation, as well as more general space domain awareness, or the ability to track, identify and understand the behavior of satellites and space debris.

Will Crowe, co-founder and chief executive of HEO, spoke with Space.com at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney in early October, describing the company's plans to deliver images of spacecraft and more even farther away from Earth.

HEO, founded in 2019, began as an asteroid-mining venture but quickly pivoted to find a business case. It started pushing boundaries as soon as it began imaging spacecraft, though what was possible or not was not immediately clear.

"The national security establishment has already been doing this for five decades but thought that no one could replicate it, so they made it highly classified," Crowe said.

"No one without a classification knew it was possible because it was just very secretive," he added, laughing. "But we didn't know we shouldn't know that, so we just started playing, and there was no one to stop us, because we're here in Australia."

The company is now looking to advance to providing images of spacecraft in geostationary orbit (GEO), a special orbit at which satellites orbit at a speed that keeps them effectively fixed over a spot on the equator 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) below. GEO is inhabited by, among other craft, high-value communications and weather satellites.

HEO does not operate its own satellites. In terms of acquiring images, HEO partners with a range of Earth-imaging companies such as Blacksky and Satellogic and makes use of the satellites when they are not active — for example, when they're passing over the oceans. But GEO, unlike LEO, has a scarcity of satellites with cameras. This means HEO will be looking to get its own imagers and sensors and required software on satellites getting ready for the trip to GEO.

"Getting to GEO is going to be very challenging, so we're focused on that right now," Crowe said. "Huge revenue unlock for us, huge capability unlock for our customers. So that's our main technical goal over the next 12 months."

The company also signed a three-year memorandum of understanding with satellite servicing and orbital sustainability firm Astroscale at IAC in Sydney, deepening cooperation on monitoring, assessing and ultimately servicing allied defense, government and commercial assets.

Notably, Astroscale has performed a fly-around of a spent rocket stage in orbit, as part of its plans to start deorbiting pieces of space junk. HEO can help with such operations, Crowe explained. "It's just good practice to have outside eyes looking in. Issues can happen to a sensor on board, but also you can get a different perspective." The agreement between HEO and Astroscale also covers extending cooperation into GEO and geostationary transfer orbits.

HEO also recently received the first National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Tier-3 license for a commercial optical camera operating in high LEO (above 800 kilometers, or 500 miles), a sign of growing official recognition of non-Earth imaging as part of space safety infrastructure.

This expansion to a higher Earth orbit is, however, just another step in a broader plan. The long term vision? "The solar system on demand," said Crowe. "If you want to go see an asteroid, we will enable that mission."

"We're starting with just the asteroids that are coming through the Earth-moon system," he added. "But there's no reason why we can't enable it for everything: the asteroid belt or all the other various asteroid classes. It should be possible. You just need enough cameras and enough interesting orbits such that they can always achieve the mission."

HEO is already normalizing non-Earth imagery, and the leap from Earth orbit to more distant destinations may well follow, repurposing and reimagining what is possible in space.

Over the past year, Ukraine dispatched thousands of wheeled ground robots to its frontline military units to help deliver supplies, evacuate the wounded and, in some cases, attack the intruding Russians troops and push them out without risking the lives of Ukrainian soldiers. But the limited bandwidth SpaceX's satellites can provide means that individual terminals mounted on the UGVs have to make do with as little as 10 megabits per second, which results in poor quality of the video feed used to control the UGVs.

"If you want to drive fast, you need a frame rate of at least 30 frames per second to be able to control the robot," Vadym Burukin, technologist and CEO of drone start-up Huless, told Space.com. "If you only have ten frames per second and you are moving fast, there is a huge chance that you're going to end up in a minefield or in a tree."

SpaceX's internet-beaming Starlink megaconstellation has been indispensable for Ukraine since the early days of the war. Its terminals keep troops connected on the battlefield but also help guide FPV drones, marine robots and unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) beyond the reach of radio links. According to sources with links to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, as many as 200,000 Starlink terminals are active in Ukraine, making the former Soviet republic by far the biggest user of Starlink services in Europe.

But the high number of devices, especially along the frontlines, means the robots can only travel at meager speeds of about 6 miles per hour (10 kilometres), Andriy Dovbenko, Ukrainian entrepreneur and CEO of the Ukrainian Tech Exchange network, told Space.com. Due to that slow speed, the ground robots need up to two hours to cross the 12-mile-wide (20-kilometer) grey zone, where troops and equipment are in constant danger of being destroyed by Russian first-person-view (FPV) drones. "It's quite slow for [unmanned ground vehicles]," Dovbenko said. "You want to have at least 20 kilometres per hour [24 miles]."

Starlink terminals, Burukin added, also tend to get buggy due to the vibrations of the UGV rolling over rugged terrain. Clouds, rain and even tree canopy overhead can further degrade the signal.

In response, Ukrainian tech innovators are looking for alternatives that would enable the robots to drive faster to increase their chances of completing their missions before they get spotted and bombed by Russian kamikaze drones.

To solve the problem, Burukin and his colleagues have developed tethered drones that rise 500 feet high (150 meters), carrying signal repeaters that amplify the weak radio signals to increase their reach.

"For ground-to-ground communication [the radio signal range] is just a couple of kilometers," said Burukin. "With a repeater in the air, this range extends to 40 plus kilometers (25 miles)."

Flying drones can fly even further thanks to the airborne repeaters, up to 48 miles (80 kilometers) from their controllers hidden away from the enemy drones' reach.

This allows Ukrainian soldiers to conduct bold exploratory missions deep into the territory now controlled by Russia while not worrying about losing their Starlink signal.

"Recently, we were able to get all the way to the Donbas arena, a big stadium in the center of Donetsk, flying drones using our repeating equipment," said Burukin.

Donetsk, some 30 miles (50 km) from the current frontline, has been controlled by Russian separatists since 2014.

Still, Starlink remains indispensable for Ukraine, Dovbenko insists.

"There are many uses for Starlink in the war, but it's not been developed specifically as a military technology, so it has its limitations," Dovbenko said. "It would be good to have alternatives. But can we really produce an alternative to Starlink at scale? Probably not."

AI-powered autonomous navigation systems further assist the military robots to overcome signal problems due to deliberate jamming and other disruptions. In the next few years, AI is set to take over most activities along the frontline, the Ukrainian innovators hope. Autonomous war machines will not need any real-time human oversight, thus being immune to radio jamming and Starlink signal loss.

Although killer robots are unlikely to completely replace human soldiers, they will help reduce the number of people needed in the most vulnerable and dangerous locations along the frontline.

The European Space Agency (ESA) staged the exercise at its mission control center in Darmstadt, Germany, to test how its satellites and operations teams would respond to a solar superstorm rivaling the 1859 Carrington Event — the most powerful geomagnetic storm ever recorded, capable of causing severe electronic disruption. The simulation was designed to test spacecraft operations and space weather preparedness ahead of the upcoming Sentinel-1D mission, set to launch in November.

"Should such an event occur, there are no good solutions. The goal would be to keep the satellite safe and limit the damage as much as possible," Thomas Ormston, Deputy Spacecraft Operations Manager for Sentinel-1D, said in a statement from ESA.

In the simulation, the sun unleashed a triple threat. First came an enormous X-class solar flare, whose radiation hit Earth within eight minutes, disrupting communications, radar and tracking systems. A barrage of high-energy protons, electrons and alpha particles followed, striking spacecraft in orbit, triggering false readings, data corruption and potential hardware damage.

Then, about 15 hours later, a massive coronal mass ejection (CME) slammed into Earth's magnetic field. The planet's upper atmosphere swelled, increasing drag on satellites by up to 400%, knocking them from predicted orbits, heightening the risk of collisions and shortening the spacecraft's longevity.

On the ground, the same storm could overload power grids and pipelines with geomagnetic energy. The simulation forced ESA's mission controllers to make real-time decisions, offering insight on how to plan, approach and react when such an event occurs.

"The immense flow of energy ejected by the sun may cause damage to all our satellites in orbit," Jorge Amaya, Space Weather Modelling Coordinator at ESA, said in the statement. "Satellites in low-Earth orbit are typically better protected by our atmosphere and our magnetic field from space hazards, but an explosion of the magnitude of the Carrington event would leave no spacecraft safe."

The exercise demonstrated how a severe solar storm could cascade across systems, from satellite failures to degraded navigation, to the loss of critical communications. ESA scientists warned that such an event is inevitable.

"The key takeaway is that it's not a question of if this will happen but when," Gustavo Baldo Carvalho, Lead Simulation Officer of Sentinel-1D, said in the statement.

To prepare for the inevitable, ESA is expanding its monitoring network and preparing for the 2031 Vigil mission — a new spacecraft that will sit at the sun-Earth L5 point to give earlier warnings of incoming solar eruptions. The goal, officials say, is to ensure that spacecraft and ground infrastructure can recover quickly.

Russia is targeting UK space infrastructure, and in particular military satellites, on a weekly basis, according to the head of UK Space Command.

In an interview with the BBC, Maj Gen Paul Tedman said that Russia was "shadowing" UK satellites. Shadowing involves orbiting and aligning a satellite close to the target satellite, in order to be near enough to jam communications or intercept signals to steal critical information.

Tedman said Russia's satellites had "payloads on board that can see our satellites and are trying to collect information from them". He also confirmed that jamming of UK military satellites was taking place.

This involves broadcasting signals on the same frequencies as those used by satellites, in order to intentionally disrupt or overwhelm legitimate signals. It does not physically damage spacecraft, so as soon as the jamming signal is no longer being emitted, communications can be restored. The jamming of satellite signals can take place from the ground, ocean or air, as well as from space.

But what about other tactics that could be used to disrupt satellites? One thing not mentioned in relation to the attacks on British military satellites, is the use of lasers. These can be deployed to dazzle satellites' onboard optical sensors. This can interfere with electronic circuity but would not cause lasting physical damage.

The most serious type of attack of course would be the use of a direct-ascent missile, which can be launched from the ground, sea or air, to destroy an orbiting satellite. Previous tests of this kind of anti-satellite (Asat) weapon have generated worrying levels of orbiting debris. This debris can then collide with other satellites, potentially generating even more debris for other space-based assets to avoid.

On February 24, 2022, the day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, satellite broadband users across Europe got a taste of the kind of attacks that the military is now used to. A cyber-attack was launched against Viasat's Ka-Sat satellite network, which supplies internet access to tens of thousands of people across Ukraine and the rest of Europe. Experts said they believed the purpose of the attack was to interrupt service rather than to access data or systems.

A recent talk by German IT researchers also revealed how much damage hackers could potentially do if given unfettered access to a satellite's onboard systems. The experts said that attackers could exploit vulnerabilities in open source software used by NASA and Airbus to control satellites. This in turn could give the intruders access to the control functions on a satellite, allowing them to change its orbit by sending a command to fire its thrusters.

Attacks don't need to target the satellite directly. Targeting control stations on the ground can also disrupt operation of the satellites in orbit. This can also have consequences for end users of a satellite service.

Wider problem

It’s not just the UK's satellites that are being targeted, however. In September, the head of French space command Maj Gen Vincent Chusseau said there had been a spike in hostile activity in space. Chusseau said activity had increased since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

He said that adversaries, especially Russia, have diversified methods of disrupting satellites and that jamming, lasers and cyber-attacks have become commonplace.

The same month, Brig Gen Christopher Horner, commander of 3 Canadian Space Division told a space security summit that there were more than 200 anti-satellite weapons orbiting Earth.

While he didn't provide details on their nature, he said it was a "shocking number" to threaten allied satellites.

Increased investment

It's possible to satellites by improving the encryption of data transmitted to them as well as with anti-jamming technology. This uses a variety of techniques to block out or nullify the signals used by jammers to interfere with satellite communications. It’s also important to ensure there are alternative providers for critical space services as a backup in case of attack.

In response to increasing threats to UK satellite infrastructure, the UK government has recently increased its investment in projects geared towards space security. The government has invested £500,000 in a project to develop sensors that counter lasers used to blind satellites. The UK has also recently developed Borealis, a software platform designed to monitor and protect critical UK and allied satellites.

As well as investing in its own projects, the UK has also sought to improve space-based security by strengthening international partnerships. For instance, the UK recently invested €163 million (£141 million) in Eutelsat, which provides satellite internet and is a rival to Elon Musk's Starlink system.

Starlink’s importance not only for consumers, but also for military applications has been demonstrated in the Ukraine war – where Ukrainian troops had come to rely heavily on it for battlefield communications. But the drawback to this dependency on a privately owned company such as Starlink was highlighted when Musk denied coverage to Kyiv in 2023.

The investment in Eutelsat not only strengthens space-based collaboration between the UK and France, but also boosts a company providing a backup system for satellite communications.

The US and UK also recently conducted their first coordinated satellite maneuver. The US repositioned one of its own satellites to examine a UK satellite to make sure it was operating normally. Such a maneuver could potentially be used following an attack designed to disable a spacecraft.

The reports of Russian meddling highlight the importance of security in orbit as global tensions continue to expand into space.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

According to the company's application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Reflect Orbital wants to fly its demonstration satellite EARENDIL-1 next year, with an expected launch date in April. Once in orbit, the satellite will unfold a mirror that measures 60 by 60 feet (18 by 18 meters) in order to demonstrate its ability to direct sunlight down onto targets on Earth. The company, which won a $1.25 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from the U.S. Air Force in May, says its future constellation will deliver light on demand after sunset and before sunrise to paying customers on Earth, effectively extending the daytime hours.

But the project, which promises to help increase clean energy generation during peak-use morning and evening hours, has alarmed astronomers and biodiversity experts who are concerned about the effects of light pollution the constellation is going to produce.

Reflect Orbital claims on its website that its constellation will enable solar power generation at night, make crops grow better and stronger, possibly replace urban lighting, provide emergency illumination in disaster zones and enable people to work into the night.

Reflect Orbital's spokesperson told Space.com in an email that by 2030, the company envisions a constellation of 4,000 of such satellites, circling Earth in a sun-synchronous orbit following the boundary between day and night. (Satellites in a sun-synchronous orbit circle the planet from pole to pole and pass over a given spot on Earth at the same solar time each day.)

The firm said in its FCC license application the proposition had "generated significant interest from commercial and government partners," had already secured full funding for the demonstration mission and received "over 250,000 applications for service."

Astronomers and biodiversity experts, however, are voicing concerns about the development, calling for an environmental review of the space mirrors' effects on life on Earth.

"The reflectors will be directing their light [even after they pass their target] because obviously they can't shut that off," John Berentine, an astronomer at the Silverado Hills Observatory in Tucson Arizona and consultant at Dark Sky Consulting, told Space.com. "The beam reflected by these satellites is very intense, four times brighter than the full moon, and they will be flying multiple satellites in a formation. That will have an effect on wildlife in the directly illuminated area, but also, through atmospheric scattering, on the surrounding areas as well."

Robert Massey, Deputy Executive Director at the U.K.'s Royal Astronomical Society said the astronomical community was "seriously concerned about the development, its impact and the precedent it sets."

"The central goal of this project is to light up the sky and extend daylight and obviously, from an astronomical perspective, that's pretty catastrophic," Massey told Space.com.

Reflect Orbital said the company is taking such concerns seriously and wants to use the upcoming demonstration mission to limit possible negative effects of the reflected light.

"Our service is highly localized," the spokesperson wrote. "Each reflection covers a defined 5-kilometer area for a finite period of time rather than providing continuous or widespread illumination."

Once the satellite passes the target region, the mirror will tilt away from the planet's surface, the spokesperson explained.

"During the 2026 demonstration, observers at designated test sites will see the reflection as a bright moving star," the spokesperson wrote. "The illuminated area on the ground will be a soft, moonlike glow."

Astronomers, together with biodiversity experts have been waging a war against light pollution for years. Data show that since the advent of LED lights, light pollution levels globally have been rising by around 10 percent per year, virtually erasing stars from the night sky. Where some 18 years ago, one would see 250 stars at night, only around a hundred could be found today. But rising light pollution levels have also been linked to the decline of insect populations and the rising incidence of sleep disorders and depression in humans.

"Light pollution fundamentally disrupts the natural day-night cycle that has governed life on Earth for billions of years," David Smith, advocacy and social change manager at invertebrate charity BugLife, told Space.com in an email. "By effectively extending daylight hours through artificial light and blurring the boundaries between day and night, light pollution interferes with the circadian rhythms, the physiology and the behavioural patterns of countless species."

Astronomers have also been concerned about the effects of the rising numbers of satellites on their observations. SpaceX's Starlink, in particular, has been a subject of controversy as its thousands of spacecraft, flying at a low altitude of 340 miles (550 kilometers), leave streaks in their images.

AST SpaceMobile, developing a constellation of giant space antennas beaming broadband internet directly to smartphone users on Earth, has, too, been under fire for the harm its fleets do to astronomy.

But Massey said that neither of these projects has a goal of reflecting bright sunlight back to Earth, unlike Reflect Orbital. In fact, astronomers have commended SpaceX for its continued attempts to reduce the reflectiveness of its spacecraft either through the application of light-absorbing paints or visors.

"The satellite constellations that we've been dealing with create light pollution as an incidental byproduct," Massey said. "It's something that we hope can be managed and mitigated. But with this project, the brightening of the sky is the central premise."

Berentine said that outside of the directly illuminated areas, at distances of up to a hundred kilometers, the space mirrors will appear in the sky as very bright stars. These artificial stars, moving across the sky in a quick succession, will mar astronomical observation but potentially also confuse migratory birds.

He added that although Reflect Orbital has discussed the development with the astronomy community, many questions remain unanswered.

Reflect Orbital's spokesperson said the company intended to conduct an environmental impact assessment before building up the constellation and hopes to use the demonstration mission next year to "collaborate with experts to better understand ecological sensitivities at each service site."

Anti-satellite technologies (ASATs) are becoming the new military "must-have" for spacefaring nations — like China, Russia, India, as well as the United States. U.S. military leaders have openly stated that the nation needs space-based weaponry "to deter a space conflict and to be successful if we end up in such a fight." The Chief of Space Operations for the U.S. Space Force stated earlier this year that the service must " harness the benefits of technological innovation and emerging capabilities if we're going to be able to out-compete our competitors."

But what exactly is at stake in orbit, what's up there to strike, and why? Those are issues being thrashed out as countries appear to be investing in capabilities that can take out or disrupt other spacecraft.

Soft-kill

"The Russians and the Chinese are demonstrating more sophisticated orbital maneuvering abilities. There's no denying that," said Bleddyn Bowen, associate professor in Astropolitics and co-director of the Space Research Center at Durham University's school of Government and International Affairs in the United Kingdom.

"Whether they are actual ASAT platforms or not isn't as clear-cut," Bowen told Space.com. "But if you were going to develop those kinds of co-orbital ASATs, they are showing many of the techniques and capabilities that you need," he said.

Bowen said that destroying a spacecraft via a direct-hit, kinetic-kill measure is only one aspect within the ASAT vernacular. Count in "soft-kill" ideas.

"It includes electronic warfare, computer network operations, hitting a country's ground station, sabotaging terminals, even sinking ships that have terminals. Those are all things you can include in terms of "counterspace," or ASATs," said Bowen.

Interference

Are we already witnessing ASAT techniques in regular use?

"They are happening right now with Ukraine," Bowen noted, pointing to commercial satellite providers, like the SpaceX Starlink system, that have experienced jamming and cyber attacks on their in-orbit hardware.

Similarly, GPS signal interference is front and center, traced back to Russia.

"What you're seeing is the normalization of attacking satellites within war plans. It's becoming a more mainstream aspect of military operations," said Bowen.

But stepping back, Bowen sees a larger worry.

"There are much worse problems on our own planet right now. Authoritarian tendencies … the collapse of ecological systems … a deteriorating climate. That's what really keeps me worried," Bowen said. "Those are all things that are already ruining everything for us. And space is a symptom of it," he said.

Indiscriminate weapons

The past is prologue for space, suggests Bruce McClintock, lead of the RAND Space Enterprise Initiative and a senior policy researcher for the organization, and a professor at the RAND School of Public Policy.

"In the early space-era, the Soviet Union and the U.S. extensively tested a variety of different technologies for ASAT weapons, up to and including nuclear detonation tests in orbit," McClintock told Space.com.

While agreements were inked to stop such tests, the Russians are reportedly revisiting the concept and have started developing a system. "That is incredibly concerning," said McClintock.

"There are enough indicators from enough nations that this is not just posturing," advised McClintock. "A lot of people are talking about Russia doing this. It's an indiscriminate weapon. It can't just target certain satellites. It would have short to long-term effects for everybody," he said.

Dependent on space

McClintock said Russia is, in general, minimally dependent on space. On the other hand, the United States is maximally dependent on space for its economy and for warfighting. China is growing more and more dependent on space, as evidenced by their nearly day-by-day launch rate, he said.

"Therefore, it's in Russia's interest to develop what I call a 'sword of Damocles-like capability' to hang over the heads of not just the U.S., but everybody," McClintock said.

Exasperating the situation, in some ways, is the on-going development of devices to "clean up" outer space by de-cluttering the cosmos. "One person's debris removal system is another person's ASAT weapon," said McClintock. Similarly, efforts to use spacecraft to refuel, repair, or modify in-orbit spacecraft are gaining traction.

Golden Dome

One new project that is literally looming on the horizon is the U.S. Golden Dome — U.S. President Trump's quest for a layered missile defense shield for America.

Golden Dome is, in large measure, a replay of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") plan announced in 1983.

But fast forward to now. Given micro-miniaturization advancements, communications, processing capabilities, low-cost launch and other factors, the 2025 model, like its predecessor, includes space-based assets to defend the homeland from current bad-day scenarios.

"The Strategic Defense Initiative and Golden Dome are the same in that they revolve around space-based weapons," observes Durham University's Bowen. His view is that the Golden Dome system cannot work as a nuclear missile shield. "That's a non-starter, but as a space-based interceptor or counterspace system against satellites, yes, there's a lot of potential there," he said.

That doesn't mean it's the right policy choice, said Bowen, "but it's technically feasible."

Topic for conversation

RAND's McClintock agrees that many of the technology challenges of the older Star Wars program have been overcome. "But space-based interceptors are still an incredibly complex concept. It's going to be very difficult to develop, test and field on a rapid time line," he said, "but hypothetically yes, there is a potential role for space-based interceptors as ASATs.

McClintock feels that an important topic for conversation is the need for greater transparency in space. "It's not impossible. It's incredibly difficult to hide what somebody's doing on-orbit. I think increased transparency is something that needs to be pursued," he said.

While forecasting the future is crystal-ball gazing to be sure, McClintock said he is cautiously optimistic.

"I see the incredible potential of space for the benefit of humanity. I want to keep that optimism because there's so much potential that is presently untapped," said McClintock. At present, however, "space is a contested environment in the same way that every other domain is contested. Nations want and will, and are going to use space to pursue their national interests," he concluded.

Counterspace capabilities

Can ASATs be construed as a "security blanket" for spacefaring nations?

"I wouldn't necessarily say that, but more countries are investing into counterspace capabilities because they are perceived partially as ways in which to ensure access to and use of space," responded Victoria Samson, chief director of Space Security and Stability at the Secure World Foundation that promotes cooperative solutions for space sustainability.

Continuing, Samson said nations pursuing counterspace capabilities also do so out of concern of being left behind competitors and rivals or at least not being seen as keeping up with others.

For example, U.S. Space Force officials talked a lot this past spring, Samson said, about a series of rendezvous and proximity operations (RPOs) repeatedly done by Chinese satellites throughout 2024, calling it "dog-fighting in space," a phrase that is extremely inaccurate, she said.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) had been conducting a docking procedure and officials proclaimed that they can now "dog-fight" in space as well, "which again is inaccurate," Samson said.

Strategic stability

Samson said that while she doesn't see kinetic ASATs as being particularly useful, "we're seeing the line blurred between satellites conducting Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and those that are doing RPOs," she told Space.com.

SSA means keeping an eye on objects in orbit and forecasting where they will be at any given time.

"This can be a challenge because ostensibly more information about activities and objects in orbit should be a stabilizing factor," Samson said. "But if it's being collected in a manner that is deemed to be threatening or concerning, it might itself result in escalation and upend strategic stability," she concluded.

Regarding the U.S. President Trump support of Golden Dome that contains a space-based interceptor layer, or SBI. "I have a lot of questions about its feasibility as a boost phase interceptor, but SBIs would be great ASAT weapons," said Samson.

The Secure World Foundation's 2025 Global Counterspace Capabilities Report is available online.

China's Long March rocket family now has 600 flights under its belt.

A Long March 8A lifted off on Wednesday (Oct. 15) from Wenchang Space Launch Center on the island of Hainan at 9:33 p.m. EDT (0133 GMT and 9:33 a.m. local time on Oct. 16).

The mission, which successfully lofted a batch of satellites for the Guowang broadband network, was the 600th ever for a Long March rocket.

The first Long March liftoff occurred on April 24, 1970, when a Long March 1 sent China's first satellite, called Dong Fang Hong 1, to orbit.

Over the ensuing 55 years, the nation has developed more than 20 different types of Long March rockets, 16 of which are active today, according to China Daily. And China's launch cadence has accelerated considerably over that span.

"It took 37 years for the Long March family to complete its first 100 launches," China Daily wrote on Thursday (Oct. 16). "The second 100 were achieved in 7.5 years. The third 100 launches took just over four years, the fourth 100 took two years and nine months, and the fifth 100 missions were completed in two years. The most recent 100 launches were accomplished in one year and 10 months."

The fleet's success rate overall is about 97%, the outlet added.

The Long March isn't the most-flown rocket family of all time; that distinction goes to the Soviet/Russian Soyuz line, which has completed more than 1,700 missions since debuting in November 1966.

The Soviet Union's Kosmos family and the American Atlas series have hit the 600 mark as well. And SpaceX's Falcon line, consisting of the Falcon 1 (which was retired in 2009), Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, will get there soon. Falcons have flown more than 570 times to date, and they're rocketing off the pad at unprecedented rates; SpaceX has already conducted 130 Falcon 9 launches so far this year alone.

Guowang ("national network") is a nascent broadband megaconstellation in low Earth orbit (LEO) that will be operated by the state-run company China Satnet. The network will eventually consist of about 13,000 satellites, if all goes to plan.

Wednesday's launch lofted the 12th group of Guowang satellites. Each batch is thought to consist of eight to 10 spacecraft.

Another Chinese internet constellation, called Qianfan ("Thousand Sails"), will have about the same number of spacecraft. Both networks are following in the footsteps of SpaceX's Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of more than 8,600 operational spacecraft and is growing all the time. (About 70% of this year's Falcon 9 launches have been Starlink missions.)

Its twin, Gemini South, is located in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Together, these telescopes form a powerful duo that allows astronomers to observe the entire sky from both hemispheres.

What is it?

In this long-exposure image, the lines of light in the night sky are caused by both stars and satellites moving across the heavens. Satellite streaks in particular are becoming a growing issue for telescopes like Gemini North and Gemini South, as they can affect the accuracy of measurements.

Where is it?

The Gemini North telescope is located on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

Why is it amazing?

In recent years, the growing number of satellites in orbit has increased dramatically as private companies like SpaceX and Amazon launch large satellite constellations to deliver global broadband internet and other services. While these networks bring important technological advances, their presence also means more bright objects moving in the sky.

For observatories like Gemini North and Gemini South, this poses a serious issue. The reflected light from satellites can contaminate astronomical images, obscuring faint celestial objects or creating unwanted artifacts in valuable data. These disruptions make it harder to study phenomena like distant galaxies, near-Earth asteroids and the subtle signatures of exoplanet atmospheres.

To help mitigate this problem, the U.S. National Science Foundation's NOIRLab, which helps run both Gemini North and Gemini South, co-hosts the Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky (CPS), a global collaboration that coordinates research and advocacy efforts to preserve our natural view of the cosmos.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about satellite pollution and working to protect dark skies.

Space Armor is made via a proprietary fiber-to-resin manufacturing method courtesy of the company Atomic-6, which is based in Marietta, Georgia.

"Satellites and astronauts are constantly threatened by millions of untrackable, hypervelocity particles in orbit," states Atomic-6, which unveiled the new tech today (Oct. 16). "Like a loose pebble hitting your windshield on the highway, orbital debris can strike at any time to do significant damage to spacecraft."

But unlike the highway pebble, human-made debris can hit at speeds of 16,000 mph (25,750 kph) or more. If you're in the way of that ultra-speedy object, it can mess up your day by penetrating fuel tanks, ripping apart batteries and other structures.

Product design

Composites have long been anticipated as a solution for lightweight micrometeoroid and orbital debris (MMOD) shielding protection, said Trevor Smith, CEO of Atomic-6.

"Everyone has known that composite materials can make potentially lighter, stronger MMOD shields," Smith said. Atomic-6 has made that vision a reality with its Space Armor tile, thanks to a combination of product design and composite skills.

Space Armor™'s fiber-to-resin manufacturing method also provides another benefit: An enclosure using the tiles not only can protect communication gear, it also offers communications transparency. That means the system can safeguard mission-critical radio communications to and from the satellite as well.

Taking the shot

"It has taken around 18 months to take Space Armor™ tiles from an idea to a final product. So we took the shot at making a tile, and were blown away by the test results," Smith told Space.com. "We offer Space Armor™ in simple hex tiles, but we can technically make Space Armor™ into most any shape you want."

Over the decades, a "Whipple Shield" came into wide use for mitigating space debris impacts. This structure was introduced by American astronomer Fred Whipple back in the 1940s and is still in use today. In simple terms, a Whipple Shield is a sacrificial bumper on a satellite, usually made of aluminum, that absorbs the initial impact.

However, because Whipple Shields are made of metal, they generate fragments when taking a hit. Fragmentation leftovers become harmful secondary rubble that can go on to strike other satellites or astronauts.

Space Armor™ has undergone extensive hypervelocity testing here on Earth, making use of projectile-firing "guns" used to simulate high-speed run-ins with space debris on a small scale.

Smith said that Atomic-6 will be sending Space Armor™ tiles to orbit with satellite customers next year.

"The orbital environment has surprisingly high amounts of debris already," he said, "so we would effectively be testing the tiles using 'natural analogues' of hypervelocity guns. The orbital debris is already up there."

That's according to data collected by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm satellite constellation over the last 11 years. Swarm has been monitoring a region known as the South Atlantic Anomaly since 2014, and scientists have just published a new study of the area that reveals that, not only has the anomaly expanded eastward, it has actually been weakening more quickly since 2020.

"It's changing differently towards Africa than it is near South America. There's something special happening in this region that is causing the field to weaken in a more intense way," study lead author Chris Finlay, professor of geomagnetism at the Technical University of Denmark, said in an ESA statement.

Geological samples reveal that the South Atlantic Anomaly has been occurring for around 11 million years, but only since the dawn of the space age has it really had the potential to cause damage.

That's because Earth's magnetic field helps block charged particles that flow from the sun, particles that can bombard satellites or even the International Space Station with damaging radiation. As these spacecraft fly over the South Atlantic Anomaly, Earth's protective barrier is weaker, meaning more of that radiation can reach and potentially damage them or cause blackouts in communication with mission controllers on the ground.

Earth's magnetic field is produced by the spinning molten iron at its core, which generates powerful electrical currents that extend into space. According to the scientists behind the new study, there are "strange patterns" in the region between Earth's molten outer core and its rocky mantle, where our planet's magnetic field is behaving strangely.

"Beneath the South Atlantic Anomaly, we see unexpected areas where the magnetic field, instead of coming out of the core, goes back into the core. Thanks to the Swarm data, we can see one of these areas moving westward over Africa, which contributes to the weakening of the South Atlantic Anomaly in this region," Finlay said in the ESA statement.

While Earth's magnetic field appears to be weakening and growing over the South Atlantic Anomaly, there are other areas where it appears to be strengthening, according to Swarm satellite data. It has strengthened in an area over Siberia, growing by a volume comparable to the size of Greenland, but a separate strong region over Canada has shrunk by an area nearly the size of India.

Swarm has also revealed that the magnetic north pole has been moving toward Siberia, away from Canada, since at least the mid-19th century. Since many navigation systems (like compasses) rely on the magnetic north pole for orientation, this shift could potentially have real-world impacts.

Ultimately, scientists say this new study reveals how complex our planet's magnetic field is and how important spacecraft like Swarm are in revealing its nature to us.

"When you're trying to understand Earth's magnetic field, it's important to remember that it's not just a simple dipole, like a bar magnet. It's only by having satellites like Swarm that we can fully map this structure and see it changing," Finlay said.

The three Swarm satellites launched in November 2013 atop a Russian rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. Since then, they have provided "the longest continuous record of magnetic field measurements from space," according to ESA.

Observations from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission allowed scientists to track waves born from powerful storms. These waves, driven by wind, generate swells that carry destructive energy to faraway shores — even if the storm itself never makes landfall.

Using SWOT's wide-swath imaging with radar altimetry data from Earth-observing satellites including SARAL, Jason-3, Copernicus Sentinel-3A and -3B, Copernicus Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, CryoSat and CFOSAT, researchers were able to create a global picture of how storm waves move, merge and evolve as they spread outward across the planet, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA).

One storm in particular — Storm Eddie, which formed over the North Pacific in December 2024 — served as a natural laboratory for the study. During the peak of the storm, satellites observed open-ocean waves reaching nearly 65 feet (20 meters), or roughly the height of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Those are the highest ever measured from space.

Over the following two weeks, those swells traveled more than 15,000 miles (24,000 kilometers), crossing the Drake Passage and entering the tropical Atlantic. Although the storm never made landfall, its waves reached distant coasts with surprising force, powerful enough in some cases to cause erosion and flooding.

Therefore, the ocean surface acts as a "messenger," the researchers said. By measuring the time between crests of large swells, also known as wave period, researchers are able to estimate a storm's size and strength. For example, a 20-second period means a large wave arrives every 20 seconds.

The study also revealed that shorter, high-energy storm waves — not just long, slow swells — carry much of the ocean's transported energy, challenging long-held assumptions about how wave power is distributed. That insight will help scientists refine global wave models and better protect coastal communities from related hazards.

Their findings were published Sept. 16 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study found that, while in 2019 only 0.2% of satellites in Earth orbit were forced to perform more than 10 collision-avoidance maneuvers per month, that percentage had risen sevenfold by early 2025, to 1.4%. That number might still seem low, but it means that some 340 satellites spend a lot of time dodging debris and other spacecraft.

Moreover, the satellite population is set to keep growing. While in 2019 about 13,700 objects (including space junk) zoomed around the planet in low Earth orbit (LEO), at altitudes below 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers), that number has since risen to 24,185 objects in 2025, an increase of 76%, according to the study. By the end of this decade, some 70,000 satellites may reside in LEO, according to industry growth predictions, representing a more than fivefold increase compared to the 2019 situation.

The study team members said that they selected 10 collision-avoidance maneuvers per month as a threshold at which satellite operation may become too complicated to be beneficial.

"Operators don't want to be spending all their time worrying about collision avoidance," study co-author Maya Harris, a research assistant and science graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Space.com. "They don't want to spend all of their propellant doing maneuvers."

The researchers used data from the catalog of space objects maintained by U.S. Space Command and modeled the likelihood of a collision for each pair of objects, satellites and debris alike, residing in the same orbital region. Every time two objects came within less than 66 feet (200 meters) of each other, the researchers noted the event as requiring a collision-avoidance maneuver.

Different operators choose a different threshold to perform collision-avoidance maneuvers. NASA spacecraft mostly maneuver when the collision risk is greater than 1 in 10,000. SpaceX — the world's biggest satellite operator, with its Starlink broadband megaconstellation — is more cautious, using its autonomous space dodging system to avoid an object posing a risk greater than 1 in 3.3 million.

Frequent maneuvers present a disruption to operations that some satellite handlers are better able to absorb than others, Hugh Lewis, a space debris expert and professor of astronautics at the University of Birmingham in England, told Space.com.

"For an Earth-observation spacecraft, there's probably a much bigger disruption to make a maneuver, because they have to control their altitude and inclination very precisely in order to achieve a particular ground track," said Lewis, who was not part of the new study. "But for spacecraft like Starlink, they have a great deal of flexibility about the orbits that they can be in and still deliver the service."

In addition to the disruption to service, the avoidance maneuvers are not guaranteed to succeed. Space tracking is not perfectly accurate, and miscalculations are possible. On top of that, earlier studies have shown that performing an avoidance maneuver creates a higher risk of a subsequent collision with another spacecraft, as it alters the satellite's trajectory in a way that collision-prediction algorithms may not immediately account for. The more satellites in orbit, the higher the risk of one of these maneuvers failing.

Lewis said that data suggest there is already around a 10% chance of an in-orbit collision happening within a year from now. A full-on satellite collision would create thousands of new debris fragments, which would further increase the need to maneuver for operational spacecraft in nearby orbits and thus boost the probability of subsequent collisions. It is this risk of collisions that concerns researchers and operators alike.

"If we have more collisions that create a lot of debris, that will lead to us reaching [full orbital] capacity much sooner," Harris said.

Lewis said that, according to the latest report filed to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, SpaceX's Starlink satellites performed 145,000 collision-avoidance maneuvers in the six months prior to July 2025. That would be equivalent to around four maneuvers per satellite per month.

"They seem to be able to accommodate that really well," Lewis said. "They don't seem to be saying that it's getting really hard, so they might be able to accommodate it even if we get to the 10 per month."

The new study found that satellites orbiting at certain altitudes face more congestion than others. In orbital regions between the altitudes of 25 miles and 370 miles (400 to 600 km) and 435 miles and 500 miles (700 and 800 km), many satellites are already forced to dodge collisions more than 10 times per month.

"Although most of the orbit is not yet at capacity, some regions already are," said Harris. "The two most affected areas are between 400 and 600 kilometers, where many active satellites are, and then between 700 and 800 kilometers, where there is a lot of space debris."

The new study suggests that satellite operators may be able to better use the available space by launching less into orbits that are already too crowded and operating their constellations in a coordinated manner so that their satellites' orbits are in sync rather than crossing each other.

Lewis, however, questions whether global coordination of satellite operations is feasible. SpaceX is currently the by far largest satellite operator, but the company could soon have some competition for that title: Countries all over the world, including perceived adversaries like China, have plans to develop their own constellation of tens of thousands of satellites.

"I don't think it's likely to happen that you would get SpaceX and the Chinese coordinate how they structure and operate their systems," Lewis said.

The study was published in the October issue of the journal Acta Astronautica.

Editor's note: This article was updated on Oct. 14 to clarify that NASA spacecraft maneuver when the collision risk is greater than 1 in 10,000, not 1 in 100,000, and that Starlink satellites are now using a maneuver threshold of 1 in 3.3 million, not 1 in 1 million.

That's the nickname that Brendan Carr, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has given to October 2025. The branding is part of the agency's push to streamline space regulations, which Carr said is a big priority going forward.

"We are declaring October 2025 'Space Month' at the FCC," Carr said in an emailed statement on Monday (Oct. 6). "Big picture — our goal is to make sure that the U.S. is the friendliest regulatory environment in the world for innovators to start, to grow and to accelerate their space operations."

The FCC has authority over space communications, issuing licenses and allocating specific segments of the radio band to satellite operators. The agency forms a sort of regulatory tag-team with the Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses rocket launches and spacecraft reentries. (Both agencies also deal with the issue of space debris)

The "Space Month" agenda calls for "modernizing" the FCC's licensing process, according to the emailed statement.

The agency "will do so by doing away with bespoke licensing processes in favor of a 'licensing assembly line,'" the statement reads. "This will include expediting licensing requests presumed to be in the public interest, as well as simplifying applications, establishing clear timelines and increasing flexibility for licensed operations."

The FCC also aims to encourage "more intensive use" of a portion of the radio spectrum known as the upper microwave flexible use bands, according to the statement.

The FCC will vote on these proposed actions later this month, according to the statement.

"At the FCC, we have been doing our part through a Build America Agenda that aims to boost our country's space economy," Carr said. "Now, the FCC is going to add rocket fuel to those efforts."

SpIRIT — formally known as the Space Industry Responsive Intelligent Thermal nanosatellite — is the first space telescope funded by the Australian Space Agency to carry a foreign space agency's scientific instrument as its main payload.

Launched in December 2023 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, SpIRIT has now completed its commissioning phase, testing all its onboard systems, including its winged thermal management and deployable camera arm, which it used to take a "selfie" in space.

Recent images shared by the University of Melbourne show the satellite in orbit, confirming that its systems were deployed and are functioning correctly. The images include snapshots of the satellite's thermal radiator, electric propulsion thruster payload, telecommunication transceivers and solar panels, which together highlight the innovative technologies developed for the mission, according to a statement from the university.

"SpIRIT is a complex satellite designed and built in Australia, with many components flying for the first time and hosting a scientific instrument contributed by the Italian Space Agency [ASI]," Michele Trenti, principal investigator and a professor at the University of Melbourne, which leads the mission in collaboration with ASI, said in the statement. "Now that SpIRIT has completed rigorous testing in space, we are confident it's ready to commence the next phase of its mission, which is truly exciting."

SpIRIT has logged over 600 days in orbit, during which it has circled Earth more than 9,000 times, travelling a distance comparable to a round trip between our planet and Mars.

With this initial phase complete, SpIRIT is moving into its core scientific role: detecting gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Using the HERMES X-ray prototype detector provided by the ASI, the satellite will look for signs of these cosmic explosions, which are generally unpredictable and difficult to spot, resulting from stellar collisions or supernovas. SpIRIT will therefore act as an early warning system for astronomers around the world to investigate further.

"The SpIRIT mission has demonstrated the capability that exists within the Australian space sector — from building the satellite and testing new technologies in orbit and on ground, to hosting international science payloads and successfully completing its initial phase," Enrico Palermo, head of the Australian Space Agency, said in the statement.

SpIRIT has already shown early success, detecting the Crab gamma pulsar after only 700 seconds of observation. It still has a long mission ahead, with more than 1,000 days expected in orbit.

In recent years, China's space activities have grown tremendously, with an operational space station in low Earth orbit (LEO), a greatly increased rate of launches and plans for multiple constellations consisting of thousands of satellites. The growth of the country's presence in orbit also raises issues of sustainability.

Bian Zhigang, vice administrator of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), was asked about what challenges this ramp-up poses for long-term sustainability in space at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney, Australia, during a Heads of Agencies plenary session on Sept. 29.

China will work on its space situational awareness capabilities in order to track objects and assess the chances of collisions, while also coordinating with other countries, Bian said. It will also take a more proactive role with regard to debris.

"Now China is promoting the space debris mitigation top level planning to promote monitoring and alerting," Bian said through an interpreter. "And also, most importantly, is, we are currently researching on the active removal of this space debris on orbit."

No details about capabilities, technologies or mission timelines were offered. China's actions to address the issue of debris will no doubt be widely welcomed, but they may also spark some concerns.

Active debris removal is a dual-use capability, meaning it can be used for civilian purposes but also for military ends. The ability to remove a defunct rocket stage or satellite from orbit could also be used to target an adversary’s spacecraft.

China is currently conducting experiments high above the Earth, with the Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 satellites apparently conducting rendezvous and proximity operations (RPOs), docking and performing a first-ever refueling in geostationary orbit.

However, unlike some other RPOs conducted by other countries and companies, China has released no images, updates or information about the activities. The opaque nature of the mission could, if replicated with future active debris removal tests, generate more suspicion than good will.

As one of the most active countries in terms of launches over the past decade, China has a number of spent rocket stages and dead satellites in orbit, whose removal from LEO would be a boost to the sustainability of crowded orbits.

Bian also reaffirmed that Chinese policies and regulations require satellite operators to deorbit satellites, or at least lower their orbits, near the end of their lifetimes

Further indications of plans and intentions may follow in future policy documents released by the CNSA. Its actions will likely be closely watched for transparency and international collaboration.

The GUARDIAN (GNSS Upper Atmospheric Real-time Disaster Information and Alert Network) taps into signals from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), like GPS. When a tsunami forms, the surge of water pushes on the air above it, sending invisible pressure waves up through the atmosphere. These waves continue rising until they reach the ionosphere — a region high above Earth where satellites send navigation signals down to the ground.

As the pressure waves ripple through the ionosphere, they bend and distort the signals, causing subtle changes that are detectable by GUARDIAN, allowing scientists to detect signs of a tsunami moving across the ocean, before the waves make landfall, according to a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

"Those extra minutes of knowing something is coming could make a real difference when it comes to warning communities in the path," JPL scientist Siddharth Krishnamoorthy said in the statement.

During the July 29 tsunami, GUARDIAN detected atmospheric disturbances within about 20 minutes of the magnitude 8.8 earthquake. As the tsunami waves traveled across the Pacific, the technology confirmed clear signs of their approach roughly 30 to 40 minutes before the waves reached Hawaii and other coastal sites.

While the waves themselves caused little damage, the event demonstrated that GUARDIAN could track a tsunami in real time and provide valuable lead time for coastal communities — just one day after a critical software upgrade was deployed to the ground-based network.

"NASA's GUARDIAN can help fill the gaps," Christopher Moore, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Center for Tsunami Research, said in the statement. "It provides one more piece of information, one more valuable data point, that can help us determine, yes, we need to make the call to evacuate."

GUARDIAN's readings require expert interpretation, but it is already one of the fastest tsunami-monitoring tools. Within about 10 minutes of receiving satellite data, it can detect ripples in the upper atmosphere formed by a budding tsunami. By adding a space-based layer of observation to traditional forecasting tools like buoys and seismometers, GUARDIAN could improve early warning for tsunamis worldwide.

Update 9/23: The satellites involved in the GUARDIAN system are global satellites; none belong to NASA. This article has been updated to reflect that.

U.S. Space Command maneuvered one of its spacecraft in order to examine the Skynet 5A military communications satellite operated by the United Kingdom and assure the U.K. that it was operating in orbit as intended. The maneuver took place between Sept. 4 and Sept. 12 at an altitude of 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) in geostationary orbit, where satellites remain above a fixed spot on Earth. Both spacecraft were traveling 6,835 mph (11,000 km/h) during the operation, according to a statement from the Royal Air Force (RAF).

While the operation was peaceful in nature and conducted between allies of Multinational Force-Operation Olympic Defender (a space security coalition including the U.S., Canada, the U.K, France, Germany, New Zealand and Australia), it also demonstrates that the U.S. military is capable of maneuvering close to other nations' satellites if need be.

The operation was what is known as a rendezvous proximity operation, or RPO, in which one spacecraft maneuvers into the same orbit close to another spacecraft in order to inspect, repair or dock with it.

"This operation was a first of its kind for U.K. Space Command and represents a significant increase in operational capability," said Major General Paul Tedman, commander of U.K. Space Command, in the RAF's statement.

"Expertly executed with U.S. Space Command, I could not be more pleased or proud of the rapid progress we are making with our allies in Multinational Force-Operation Olympic Defender. We are now, with our allies, conducting advanced orbital operations to protect and defend our shared national and military interests in space."

The commander of both U.S. Space Command and Multinational Force-Operation Olympic Defender, Gen. Steven Whiting, said the operation shows off the "warfighting advantage" this space security coalition offers, including a "shared pledge to fight and win shoulder-to-shoulder, if necessary," according to a U.S. Space Command statement.

While this was a peaceful RPO, it no doubt sends a message to potential adversaries that the U.S. and its allies are capable of getting up close and personal with other nations' satellites if need be. According to U.S. Space Command's statement, the RPO demonstrated the alliance's "readiness to conduct dynamic, responsible, and integrated space operations at a time and place of our choosing."

But while neither U.S. Space Command nor the RAF explicitly stated that this same capability could be used to get close to non-allied spacecraft in their recent statements about this RPO, Whiting has previously stated that this is indeed the case.

Earlier this year, Whiting told attendees of the Space Foundation's 40th annual Space Symposium that the United States and France recently conducted their first-ever bilateral RPO to "demonstrate combined capabilities in space in the vicinity of a strategic competitor spacecraft."

At the same event, Whiting also stressed the need for "orbital interceptors" that can project U.S. military power in space. "And what do we call these?" Whiting said. "We call these weapons, and we need them to deter a space conflict and to be successful if we end up in such a fight."

The U.S. Space Force has been developing and refining how it conducts orbital warfare throughout its five years of existence as a military service. The capability to maneuver up close to a potential adversary's spacecraft is no doubt a part of that playbook — one the U.S. just showed off.

"It's extremely urgent. These satellites, ACE, SOHO, DSCOVR, are all working beyond their design life," Richard Ullman, deputy director, NOAA Office of Space Weather Observations, said during a media press briefing on Aug. 21. "The need is urgent, and we must replace this capability now."

For decades, Earth has relied on a handful of satellites parked a million miles away, including NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), launched in 1997, and NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), launched in 2015, to provide the first warning when potentially disruptive space weather is headed our way. But many of those spacecraft are operating well past their prime.

Why watching the sun matters

Solar storms do more than spark stunning auroras. When the sun launches eruptions of charged particles, they race across space and slam into Earth's magnetic field. These events, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), can disturb GPS signals, threaten astronauts, damage satellites and in extreme cases, even knock out power grids on the ground.

The only reason operators have time to prepare is thanks to spacecraft stationed at a sweet spot called Lagrange Point 1, or L1. From that lookout point, about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) between Earth and the sun, satellites get a front-row seat to the complex space weather environment, including the solar wind. By measuring the solar wind speed, density and magnetic orientation, these satellites can give Earth anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour of warning before the storm arrives.

"These warnings are the first line of defense against the potentially devastating effects of space weather," Irene Parker, performing the duties of the assistant administrator, NOAA Satellites, said during the media briefing.

A fleet in crisis

Until now, the job of keeping a watchful eye on the sun has mostly fallen to a handful of older missions. NASA's ACE spacecraft has been working for nearly three decades, far beyond its intended five-year lifespan. The joint NASA-NOAA DSCOVR mission, launched in 2015 and intended to take over from ACE, has struggled with reliability. As of July 2025, it is offline following a software anomaly. There is currently "no timeline for restoration of data flow," NOAA told Space.com in an email. For now, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) is again relying on NASA's ACE spacecraft as its primary source of solar wind data, alongside imagery from ESA/NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and NOAA's GOES-19 satellite, which carries the agency's first operational compact coronagraph, according to NOAA.

"DSCOVR's been, sadly, a bit of a disappointment," Space weather physicist Tamitha Skov told Space.com in an interview. "We were supposed to be able to retire ACE."

Even SOHO, launched in 1995 as a research mission, is still providing useful solar imagery and data long after its intended retirement in 1998.

The current reliance on a nearly 30-year-old spacecraft highlights just how fragile our space weather monitoring network has become. If any of these missions were to fail without replacement, the consequences could be severe.

"We're hanging on by a thread, literally, both funding-wise and getting new observations out there," Skov told Space.com. "We are all used to single-point failures. And so does it frustrate or scare us? Not anymore, it just is the state of things."

Enter SWFO-L1

NOAA's new mission is designed to shore up this fragile system, ensuring that if ACE finally fails or DSCOVR cannot be recovered, real-time solar wind monitoring will continue uninterrupted. Once it arrives at L1, SWFO-L1 will measure the solar wind, magnetic fields, and high-energy particles streaming from the sun. These measurements will flow in real time to NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, where forecasters issue alerts and warnings to everyone from airlines to power grid operators.

"It can't stop an incoming threat, but it can give us time to prepare," Parker said. "SWFO-L1 will give our forecasters at NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center the advanced tools they need to protect our country's critical systems."

What makes SWFO-L1 different is its focus. While spacecraft like NASA's Parker Solar Probe or ESA's Solar Orbiter are revolutionizing our understanding of solar physics, SWFO is dedicated to operations. It is not about scientific discovery as much as it is about reliability: making sure there is always an eye on the sun, feeding data into space weather models.

"We at the Space Weather Prediction Center are extremely eager for SWFO-L1 spacecraft to not only launch but get in position and start receiving solar wind observations into our operations," said Shawn Dahl, forecaster, Space Weather Prediction Center, NOAA's National Weather Service. "This is a giant leap forward to our forecast of decision support services that we provide right here at the Space Weather Prediction Center."

For the scientists who have been pushing for new investments in space weather monitoring, Sept. 23 marks the start of a new chapter.

"This launch is not just about a new satellite, it's about building a more resilient future, ensuring that technologies we depend on are protected from the sun's most extreme events," Parker said.

And for the rest of us, whether we rely on GPS navigation, satellites for communication, or just want to enjoy the auroras, it means the sun will stay firmly in sight.

Owners of the newest iPhones have been able to text 911 in emergency situations via satellites circling the planet in low Earth orbit since late 2022. Those phones, however, needed specialized antennas to connect to dedicated satellite communications frequencies.

The life-saving service, which automatically shares the caller's precise location, became more widely available earlier this year after mobile operator T-Mobile turned on its text-to-911 service in cooperation with SpaceX's Starlink satellites for all existing cell phones less than four years old. The service has been available in beta testing since February and came fully online this summer.

Satellite emergency text messaging is now being integrated into the U.S.-wide next-generation 911 (NG911) system that allows people in distress to send text messages instead of calling 911 to get help, John Snapp, vice president of technology at Intrado, told Space.com.

Intrado is a Nebraska-based public safety communications provider, which developed the infrastructure to incorporate satellite networks into the NG911 system. The company's Emergency Call Relay Center (ECRC) handled the 911 text message sent out by the distressed Girl Scout leaders on June 22 of this year after one of their charges slipped and fell into a canyon while exploring the 3,694-foot (1,126 meters) mountain Pico Blanco, in Los Padres National Forest near Big Sur, California.

The troop of seven teenage girls and their leaders were looking forward to an adventurous night in nature. But the overnight hike took a serious turn when the girl fell, losing consciousness. If not for the recently enabled satellite emergency messaging service, the accident could have ended in tragedy.

"In the past, they would have to send somebody to hike out and find a spot with regular terrestrial signal and hope that they would find their way back and guide the rescue team there," Snapp said.

Cell phone coverage is extremely patchy in Los Padres National Forest due to its rugged terrain and remoteness. Although the park attracts millions of nature-loving visitors every year, terrestrial cell phone signal quickly wanes once one wanders off populated areas and away from main roads.

"When people are lost in remote areas with no knowledge of their location and cellular coverage is too weak for standard communication, pinpointing a 911 caller becomes extraordinarily challenging," Intrado ECRC Manager Jason Davis, who coordinated the emergency response, told Space.com. "In this rescue operation, satellite technology proved absolutely critical. Without satellite-enabled communication and precise location identification, this rescue could have stretched from hours into days, requiring extensive search teams and additional resources to locate the missing hikers."

Instead, satellite-enabled supplemental coverage from space allowed Intrado's ECRC team to immediately identify the caller's exact position and rapidly coordinate with local first responders. The first helicopter was dispatched in minutes to retrieve the injured girl; a second chopper followed about an hour later to bring the rest of the troop to safety.

Snapp said that terrestrial cellular networks cover only about 80% of U.S. territory. The scenic slopes of the Los Padres National Forest are among the remaining 20% of the U.S. landmass that, prior to the introduction of satellite direct-to-cell services, was completely off-grid.

Starlink was founded with the mission to provide broadband connectivity to remote areas around the world. Out of its fleet of around 8,000 satellites currently in orbit, over 500 enable direct-to-cell text messaging. Other satellite operators are working to support direct-to-cell services as well. Vodafone and AT&T have partnerships to provide 4G and 5G connectivity via satellite with AST SpaceMobile. The early Apple service relied mostly on the U.S. constellations Iridium and GlobalStar, which are otherwise known for providing satellite telephony requiring dedicated and rather costly handsets.

"The important thing is that these services now work completely seamlessly on the phone," Snapp said. "The satellite is like just another cell tower, only in space, and the phone is constantly looking for a cell site to connect with. It gives you ubiquitous coverage wherever people are."

Snapp said the technology will be a gamechanger for adventurers of all sorts — and also mariners sailing in international waters worldwide, which are out of the reach of cell towers.

The Izaña-1 and Izaña-2 laser-ranging stations are operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) and were constructed by the German company DiGOS, which specializes in laser ranging. Izaña-1 has been active since 2021 and has already been employed in satellite laser-ranging, but with Izaña-2 now complete, the pair of telescopes have a much more ambitious task as part of ESA's Space Safety Program.

The two telescopes operate synchronously: Izaña-2 fires laser pulses at a piece of space debris high overhead, and Izaña-1 detects the reflected light. In doing so, the system is able to track the path of the debris, charting its orbit and determining whether it could potentially collide with a satellite.

"We had to scale up the power of the laser on Izaña-2 because the plan is to illuminate non-comparative targets; therefore, the amount of photons transmitted back towards the station is limited and we compensate with more energetic pulses," said Andrea Di Mira, an ESA optical system engineer, in a promotional video on the ESA website.

An orbital collision could range from bad to potentially very bad. An individual satellite may be severely damaged, which could result in a financial loss, or the loss of research data if the satellite is a scientific one. In the worst-case scenario, a collision could smash a satellite into many more pieces of space debris, which each then go on to collide with more satellites, which produces more chunks of space junk, and so on and so forth. This could result in a runaway and very dangerous cascade called the Kessler Syndrome, after the NASA scientist Donald Kessler, who first described it. In such a scenario, large sections of low Earth orbit could become unusable because the density of space debris becomes too great.

It is therefore vital that space junk is tracked, so that satellites can maneuver to get out of the way before they are hit.

The Izaña system currently runs semi-automatically, and can even be used in the daytime. While everything is automated, a team of humans remotely supervise Izaña-1 and Izaña-2, but the aim is for it to one day be completely autonomous.

"As part of the development roadmap, we're planning to go to [full] automation. This has the great advantage [of] increasing data productivity," said Di Mira.

The ambition doesn't stop there. Presently, if the Izaña system detects a fragment of space debris hurtling towards a satellite, the satellite then has to take evasive action, firing thrusters to push it out of the way.

There may, however, be another way, called "laser momentum transfer."

"One possibility is laser momentum transfer to gently push the space debris on its orbit a little bit away so it doesn't collide with orbiting satellites," said André Kloth, Managing Director at DiGOS, in the video.

The laser on Izaña-2 could push space junk out of the way, in the same way that a laser can push a solar sail through the momentum of photons impacting on it. With the laser coming to the rescue, a satellite doesn't have to move out of the way, so it can conserve its fuel, helping to prolong the mission for as long as possible.

With Izaña-1 tracking space debris and satellites and Izaña-2 pushing the debris away, ESA potentially has an all-in-one space debris avoidance scheme on its hands that feeds into another of the agency's projects called OMLET, or Orbital Maintenance via Laser momEntum Transfer. OMLET would supply satellite operators with an on-demand system of knowing exactly where their satellites are in relation to space debris, and then the capability to push that debris out of the way. In a sense, OMLET would be like a space-traffic cop, marshaling the orbits of satellites and debris.

There's even the potential that the laser on Izaña-2 could pull double duty as a testbed for laser communication, firing lasers encoded with data up to satellites that can then relay those laser messages to their destinations. Besides there being less interference than at radio waves, optical and infrared lasers also support quantum encryption — what's known as QKD, or quantum key distribution, in which the key to encrypting the data is encoded into the quantum superposition of the photons.

Even on a cloudy day, today's lasers can still push through and reach their target. Indeed, orbiting Earth-observation satellites routinely use lasers for light-detection and ranging (lidar) on the planet's surface, despite the clouds and smog, while Chinese scientists have recently conducted the first ever daytime laser-ranging experiment from Earth to the moon.

Sixty-five years after their invention, it seems that lasers are still lighting the way to a better future in space.

The unexpected satellite alignment above Dingxin Airbase in the Gobi Desert of western China took place on Aug. 21 and created a range of unusual effects in the high-resolution image. Dingxin Airbase, which provided a backdrop for the orbital encounter, is one of the most secretive military locations in China, known for conducting complex fighter jet drills and bomber exercises, and supporting development of new military drones.

The visible-light photo, taken by one of Maxar Technologies' WorldView Legion satellites orbiting at an altitude of 312 miles (518 kilometers), shows what appears to be a fleet of fighter jets resting on the ramp adjacent to the runway surrounded by brown, arid soil. In the upper-left corner of the image, a ghostly oblong shadow appears in the picture with a silver-colored middle section and two darker-colored arms stretching to the sides.

The photobomber is a satellite — specifically, one of SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites, which Maxar identified as spacecraft number 33828. The mirror effect comes from a trio of rainbow-colored reflections of the satellite, which enliven the drab desert surface below.

Susanne Hake, Maxar's general manager for U.S. government, who posted the image on LinkedIn, described the colorful reflections as a "pan-sharpening spectral artifact," caused by the extremely high speeds — around 5 miles (8 kilometers) per second — at which the two satellites passed each other.

"Essentially, our imaging system was merging high-resolution black & white data with color data while the Starlink zipped past at orbital velocity," Hake wrote in the post. "Physics turned a technical imaging challenge into accidental art."

Hake added that, although the orbital encounter underscores how crowded near-Earth space has become, the incident was more of a spectacular rarity than a concern for safety or image quality.

"Capturing another satellite like this in an Earth-observation image is extremely rare," Hake told Space.com in an email. "In this case, a Starlink satellite happened to pass through our field of view at just the right moment while our sensors were mid-collection — an extraordinary alignment, given the vastness of space and the fact that we were traveling at an astonishing relative velocity of about 1,400 meters per second."

The Starlink megaconstellation operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX has come under criticism from astronomers because the sunlight reflected by the low-Earth-orbit fleet leaves streaks in telescope images. The problem is especially felt by large-scale surveys such as the recently opened Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, which capture vast swaths of the sky in every sweep and therefore catch many satellites in each photo.

Currently comprising more than 8,300 active satellites, the Starlink constellation also disturbs radio telescope observations. When the spacecraft fly over radio-quiet antenna arrays, tuned to listen for the quietest radio waves coming from distant galaxies, the noise from the satellites' internal electronics obscures some of the precious observation frequencies even when Earth-facing internet beams are switched off.

The growing number of satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) also worries space sustainability experts, who warn about the increasing risk of orbital collisions. Although Starlink encounters are currently no bother to Earth-observation satellite operators such as Maxar, Hake stressed that the continued growth in LEO satellite numbers may become a challenge in the future.

"The 'crowded' space domain isn't just about collision avoidance anymore — it's about understanding how these overlapping capabilities create both opportunities and complexities for mission planning," she wrote in the LinkedIn post. "That's why integrated space domain awareness isn't just nice-to-have anymore — it's foundational to mission success."

The sale ends EchoStar's plans to build its own constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO) that would beam 5G connectivity directly to smartphone users in under-connected areas on Earth. The company, founded in 1980, operates a fleet of 10 geostationary satellites, offering internet broadband via satellite as well as satellite TV broadcasting.

EchoStar's business, however, has been suffering for years due to declining consumer interest, especially as it has faced competition from fast-growing LEO constellations, such as SpaceX's Starlink, which provide better throughput and lower latencies. Since May, questions have swirled around EchoStar's financial health after the company failed to pay $326 million in interest on its debt.

The deal with Starlink will ease the financial burden while enabling EchoStar to integrate Starlink's direct-to-device coverage into its offering.

"For the past decade, we've acquired spectrum and facilitated worldwide 5G spectrum standards and devices, all with the foresight that direct-to-cell connectivity via satellite would change the way the world communicates," Hamid Akhavan, president and CEO of EchoStar, said in a statement.

"This transaction with SpaceX continues our legacy of putting the customer first as it allows for the combination of AWS-4 and H-block spectrum from EchoStar with the rocket launch and satellite capabilities from SpaceX to realize the direct-to-cell vision in a more innovative, economical and faster way for consumers worldwide," Akhavan added.

Starlink launched its direct-to-device service in 2024, enabling users in remote locations to send text messages via its ever-growing satellite network. The EchoStar spectrum covers the so-called H block part of the Advanced Wireless Services spectrum at frequencies between 1915-1920 megahertz (MHz), which is used for 4G and 5G mobile voice and data transmission.

SpaceX will pay $8.5 billion in cash for the spectrum licenses plus another $8.5 billion in SpaceX stock.

For SpaceX, the spectrum purchase means more capacity on its direct-to-cell satellites, further enabling broadband data access to cell phones in the future. The company estimates the new spectrum could increase the throughput of the next-generation satellites up to 20 times compared to the generation in orbit right now.

"We're so pleased to be doing this transaction with EchoStar as it will advance our mission to end mobile dead zones around the world," Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX president and chief operating officer, said in a statement.

"SpaceX's first-generation Starlink satellites with direct-to-cell capabilities have already connected millions of people when they needed it most — during natural disasters so they could contact emergency responders and loved ones — or when they would have previously been off the grid," she added. "In this next chapter, with exclusive spectrum, SpaceX will develop next-generation Starlink direct-to-cell satellites, which will have a step change in performance and enable us to enhance coverage for customers wherever they are in the world."

The deal also ended the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's investigation into EchoStar's use of the allocated spectrum, which had previously been questioned by SpaceX. In August, EchoStar agreed to a $23 billion sale of 50 MHz of terrestrial mobile spectrum to telecommunications giant AT&T.

Big constellations such as SpaceX's Starlink bring high-speed internet to people in remote, under-connected areas. But they also stain optical telescope images with streaks and disrupt observations by radio telescopes — highly sensitive antennas designed to detect weak radio waves emitted by distant galactic cores, black holes and neutron stars.

Astronomers building the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) in Australia and South Africa, for example, have said that radio interference from LEO satellites could obscure signals that indicate the presence of alien life outside the solar system and drown out radiation coming from the most distant galaxies.

A team of researchers from the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) has spent three years working on a solution. Together with SpaceX, the scientists developed a complex data-sharing system that in real time informs the Starlink system about scheduled telescope observations, including the frequencies in which astronomers plan to observe. When the satellites fly over the telescopes, the system orders them to redirect their beams away from the sensitive antennas or to mute their electronics.

"The good news is that it's autonomous on both sides," Chris De Pree, deputy spectrum manager at the NRAO, told Space.com. "We are sending information in real time to SpaceX about what the telescope is doing, their system digests it and issues commands to the satellites that are approaching the telescope."

De Pree led a team that has worked with SpaceX since 2022 to develop the solution. It consists of two components — the Operational Data Sharing (ODS) system, which sends the observing schedules to Starlink, and the Starlink Telescope Boresight Avoidance algorithm, which then orders the satellites to redirect their beams. (Boresight refers to the alignment axis in which a telescope observes.)

The system has been successfully tested at the NRAO's Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico since August 2024 and will soon commence further tests at other facilities, including the nearby Very Long Baseline Array and the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

VLA, located in the desert near the city of Socorro, consists of 28 radio antennas, each of which is 82 feet (25 meters) wide. The array, built in the 1970s, has made significant contributions to our understanding of black holes, young stars and the motions of the Milky Way galaxy's core. Shortly after the deployment of the first Starlink satellites in 2019, however, astronomers realized that the advent of satellite megaconstellations could seriously impair the telescope's ability to study the universe in the future.

"For decades, radio astronomers have been building telescopes at remote sites to avoid radio frequency interference," De Pree said. "We understood that there would always be some radio interference near the horizon, but as the telescope's sensitivity is mostly amplified toward one small portion of the sky, it wasn't such a problem. But with satellite constellations, there are now potentially thousands of sources of radio frequency interference directly above the telescopes."

Cosmic radio waves, travelling across distances of millions of light-years, are much fainter than radio signals used on Earth for radio or TV broadcasting and cellular telephony or WiFi. Sensitive radio telescopes are therefore usually surrounded by radio-quiet zones where no broadcasting or wireless communication devices are allowed. But no one bans satellites from overflying such zones. In fact, De Pree said, hundreds of satellites pass over the VLA every day.

"Nowhere is remote anymore," De Pree said.

And it's bound to get worse. Some 3,000 satellites were orbiting Earth in 2019 when SpaceX began launching the Starlink constellation. The broadband-beaming fleet has ballooned to more than 8,000 operational spacecraft since those first deployments, pushing the total number of satellites circling Earth to over 15,000. And SpaceX is not yet done with the Starlink expansion, aiming for over 40,000 satellites in the next decade.

Other players — including Amazon with its Project Kuiper and the Chinese efforts Spacesail and Guowang — are deploying their fleets, too. By 2030, some 100,000 satellites could circle the planet, disrupting radio astronomy observations not hundreds of times per day but thousands.

Aware of this potential doomsday scenario, the NRAO team reached out to SpaceX already in 2021 to discuss a fix.

"Radio telescope electronics are very sensitive; they weren't developed to handle such strong signals [as the satellites produce]," said De Pree. "It's as if somebody is yelling at you. What frequently happens is that this noise doesn't only affect the frequency band that they are transmitting in but a much broader region of the spectrum."

In the 1950s, the International Telecommunication Union reserved a small portion of the radio spectrum for radio astronomy, a set of bands on which no users are allowed to broadcast their signal. But satellite operators have been increasingly encroaching on that spectrum. On top of that, astronomical objects don't emit radiation solely within the protected bands, meaning that radio astronomers are always looking to get a glimpse of those distant sources in other than the reserved wavelengths.

"The challenge to radio astronomy is that a lot of these spectrum regions that used to be pretty quiet in the past are now being filled with transmissions," said De Pree. "So, as we start to lose more and more of those little chunks, the time that we need to complete our observations goes up."

De Pree thinks the new system could be adapted for other major radio telescopes around the world, allowing radio astronomers to continue their work in the decades to come. He hopes that not just other observatories but other satellite operators will also adopt the technology, potentially allowing radio astronomy and internet-beaming constellations to coexist in peace.

China is ramping up construction of its national satellite-internet megaconstellation.

A Long March 5B rocket lifted off from Wenchang Space Launch Center on the island of Hainan on Wednesday (Aug. 13) at 2:43 a.m. EDT (0643 GMT; 2:43 p.m. local time), carrying a batch of satellites aloft for the Guowang broadband network.

The mission to low Earth orbit (LEO) was a complete success, according to the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC).

Guowang, whose name translates as "national network," will be operated by China Satnet, a state-run company established in 2021. The constellation will eventually consist of about 13,000 satellites, if all goes to plan.

Guowang is a long way from that goal. Wednesday's launch was just the eighth overall for the network, and each mission lofts just eight to 10 spacecraft, apparently because each satellite is quite large.

For comparison, SpaceX launches 24 to 28 satellites on each mission to assemble its Starlink broadband megaconstellation, which currently consists of nearly 8,100 operational spacecraft.

But China is picking up the Guowang pace: Wednesday's liftoff was the fourth for the project in less than three weeks.

Guowang isn't the only Chinese broadband megaconstellation in the works. Another one, called Qianfan ("Thousand Sails"), began construction last year, like Guowang — and it's envisioned to be just as big.

And the megaconstellation push extends beyond Starlink, Guowang and Qianfan. On Monday (Aug. 11), for example, SpaceX launched a batch of satellites for Project Kuiper, Amazon's planned LEO broadband network, which will eventually feature about 3,200 spacecraft.

Marine protected areas cover more than 8% of the world's oceans today, but they can get a bad rap as being protected on paper only.

While the name invokes safe havens for fish, whales and other sea life, these areas can be hard to monitor. High-profile violations, such as recent fishing fleet incursions near the Galapagos Islands and ships that "go dark" by turning off their tracking devices, have fueled concerns about just how much poaching is going undetected.

But some protected areas are successfully keeping illegal fishing out.

In a new global study using satellite technology that can track large ships even if they turn off their tracking systems, my colleagues and I found that marine protected areas where industrial fishing is fully banned are largely succeeding at preventing poaching.

What marine protected areas aim to save

Picture a sea turtle gliding by as striped butterfly fish weave through coral branches. Or the deep blue of the open ocean, where tuna flash like silver and seabirds wheel overhead.

These habitats, where fish and other marine life breed and feed, are the treasures that marine protected areas aim to protect.

A major threat to these ecosystems is industrial fishing.

These vessels can operate worldwide and stay at sea for years at a time with visits from refrigerated cargo ships that ferry their catch to port. China has an extensive global fleet of ships that operate as far away as the coast of South America and other regions.

The global industrial fishing fleet – nearly half a million vessels – hauls in about 100 million metric tons of seafood each year. That's about a fivefold increase since 1950, though it has been close to flat for the past 30 years. Today, more than one-third of commercial fish species are overfished, exceeding what population growth can replenish.

When well designed and enforced, marine protected areas can help to restore fish populations and marine habitats. My previous work shows they can even benefit nearby fisheries because the fish spill over into surrounding areas.

That's why expanding marine protected areas is a cornerstone of international conservation policy. Nearly every country has pledged to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030.

Big promises – and big doubts

But what "protection" means can vary.

Some marine protected areas ban industrial fishing. These are the gold standard for conservation, and research shows they can be effective ways to increase the amount of sea life and diversity of species.

However, most marine protected areas don't meet that standard. While governments report that more than 8% of the global ocean is protected, only about 3% is actually covered by industrial fishing bans. Many "protected" areas even allow bottom trawling, one of the most destructive fishing practices, although regulations are slowly changing.

The plentiful fish in better-protected areas can also attract poachers. In one high-profile case, a Chinese vessel was caught inside the Galápagos Marine Reserve with 300 tons of marine life, including 6,000 dead sharks, in 2017. This crew faced heavy fines and prison time. But how many others go unseen?

Shining a light on the 'dark fleet'

Much of what the world knows about global industrial fishing comes from the automatic identification system, or AIS, which many ships are required to use. This system broadcasts their location every few seconds, primarily to reduce the risk of collisions at sea. Using artificial intelligence, researchers can analyze movement patterns in these messages to estimate when and where fishing is happening.

But AIS has blind spots. Captains can turn it off, tamper with data or avoid using it entirely. Coverage is also spotty in busy areas, such as Southeast Asia.

New satellite technologies are helping to see into those blind spots. Synthetic aperture radar can detect vessels even when they're not transmitting AIS. It works by sending radar pulses to the ocean surface and measuring what bounces back. Paired with artificial intelligence, it reveals previously invisible activity.

Synthetic aperture radar still has limits – primarily difficulty detecting small boats and less frequent coverage than AIS – but it's still a leap forward. In one study of coastal areas using both technologies, we found in about 75% of instances fishing vessels detected by synthetic aperture radar were not being tracked by AIS.

New global analysis shows what really happens

Two studies published in the journal Science on July 24, 2025, use these satellite datasets to track industrial fishing activity in marine protected areas.

Our study looked just at those marine protected areas where all industrial fishing is explicitly banned by law.

We combined AIS vessel tracking, synthetic aperture radar satellite imagery, official marine protected area rules, and implementation dates showing exactly when those bans took effect. The analysis covers nearly 1,400 marine protected areas spanning about 3 million square miles (7.9 million square kilometers) where industrial fishing is explicitly prohibited.

The results were striking:

• Most of these protected areas showed little to no signs of industrial fishing.
• We detected about five fishing vessels per 100,000 square kilometers on average in these areas, compared to 42 on average in unprotected coastal areas.
• 96% had less than one day per year of alleged illegal fishing effort.

The second study uses the same AIS and synthetic aperture radar data to examine a broader set of marine protected areas – including many that explicitly allow fishing. They document substantial fishing activity in these areas, with about eight times more detections than in the protected areas that ban industrial fishing.

Combined, these two studies lead to a clear conclusion: Marine protected areas with weak regulations see substantial industrial fishing, but where bans are in place, they’re largely respected.

We can't tell whether these fishing bans are effective because they’re well enforced or simply because they were placed where little fishing happened anyway. Still, when violations do occur, this system offers a way for enforcement agencies to detect them.

A reason for optimism

These technological advances in vessel tracking have the potential to reshape marine law enforcement by significantly reducing the costs of monitoring.

Agencies such as national navies and coast guards no longer need to rely solely on costly physical patrols over huge areas. With tools such as the Global Fishing Watch map, which makes vessel tracking data freely available to the public, they can monitor activity remotely and focus patrol efforts where they're needed most.

That can also have a deterrent effect. In Costa Rica's Cocos Island National Park, evidence of illegal fishing activity decreased substantially after the rollout of satellite and radar-based vessel tracking. Similar efforts are strengthening enforcement in the Galapagos Islands and Mexico's Revillagigedo National Park.

Beyond marine protected areas, these technologies also have the potential to support tracking a broad range of human activities, such as oil slicks and deep-sea mining, making companies more accountable in how they use the ocean.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Satellite images reveal the scope of destruction in the south of France caused by the worst wildfire to hit the country in over seven decades.

The fire was first detected on Tuesday (Aug. 5), near the town of Ribaute in the Aude region in the southeast of France. Within less than four days, it turned some 42,000 acres (17,000 hectares) of forests and agricultural land into ashes  — an area larger than France's capital Paris.

The scope of the fire was captured in dramatic images taken by the high-resolution Pleiades Neo satellites operated by the European aerospace giant Airbus.

At its peak strength, the blaze was devouring about 2,470 acres (1,000 hectares) of land per hour, fanned by strong winds blowing from the Mediterranean Sea. Within two days of its ignition, the fire devoured 40,000 acres (16,000 hectares). At least one person died, and 13 others were injured as the fire engulfed several villages in the wine-making region, according to the BBC.

The Pleiades Neo images, taken the day after the fire started, reveal swaths of scorched land as well as burning hotspots and thick plumes of smoke covering the land. In some images, firefighting planes flying over the affected region can be seen.

NASA's Terra and Landsat 9 satellites also spotted the fire, revealing its fast-paced progress. The Terra image, obtained with the Moderate Resolution Images Spectroradiometer (MODIS), shows the situation in natural colors at 11:20 a.m. local time on Aug. 6.

The false-color images from Landsat 9, obtained one hour later, are a combination of shortwave infrared, near infrared and optical wavelengths, which together allow it to reveal the freshly burned ground that would otherwise be obscured by a thick layer of smoke.

Firefighters mostly contained the wildfire by Thursday evening, Aug. 7, according to Al Jazeera, but local authorities said it would take days to completely extinguish the remaining burning spots.

France's officials attributed the fire, the worst to have hit the country since 1949, to worsening climate change. France's popular Mediterranean coast has been hit particularly hard this year, registering over 9,000 wildfire breakouts since the beginning of the summer season, according to Al Jazeera.

The summer of 2025 is shaping up as one of the hottest on record in western Europe, with temperature records having been broken in the month of June, according to the E.U. environmental service Copernicus.

Astroscale has developed a distributed, reusable system that aims to be more cost-effective and agile than traditional approaches to active debris removal (ADR). The system is described in a U.S. patent for its "Method and System for Multi-Object Space Debris Removal."

The new method involves a single servicing spacecraft docking with multiple large space debris objects, such as defunct satellites and spent rocket stages — and transferring them to a separate vehicle, dubbed a "shepherd," for controlled reentry into Earth's atmosphere, away from populated areas.

This not only makes debris removal more cost-effective and scalable but also reduces the risk of debris surviving reentry and threatening people or infrastructure on the ground.

"This patented innovation offers a sustainable and cost-effective distributed architecture approach to active debris removal, allowing for scalable, repeatable ADR operations and controlled reentry of multiple debris objects," Astroscale said in a statement.

The system is also highly flexible, allowing different mission profiles depending on the object's size and risk. The shepherd vehicle can stay docked through reentry, detach and return to orbit, or be skipped altogether if the mission allows.

"Our distributed architecture solves a key challenge in orbital debris removal by enabling the deorbit and reentry of multiple large debris objects sustainably and economically," Mike Lindsay, Astroscale's chief technical officer, said in the same statement.

"This approach allows us to reuse our advanced servicers, capable of capturing and detumbling multi-ton objects, instead of burning them up with the debris upon reentry," Lindsay added. "This not only saves cost but also reduces the amount of potentially harmful material released into the Earth's upper

conducted a stunning up-close approach and surveillance of a discarded rocket stage as part of its ADRAS-J mission. It is preparing to launch the ELSA-M space junk collector in 2026 and will also soon attempt refueling of U.S. Space Force satellites in geostationary orbit. Astroscale will also attempt to deorbit a bus-sized rocket stage with its ADRAS-J2 mission before the end of the decade.

The company says its on-orbit servicing solutions support the secure and sustainable use of space for future generations.

The burgeoning space industry and the technologies society increasingly relies on – electric grids, aviation and telecommunications – are all vulnerable to the same threat: space weather.

Space weather encompasses any variations in the space environment between the Sun and Earth. One common type of space weather event is called an interplanetary coronal mass ejection.

These ejections are bundles of magnetic fields and particles that originate from the Sun. They can travel at speeds up to 1,242 miles per second (2,000 kilometers per second) and may cause geomagnetic storms.

They create beautiful aurora displays – like the northern lights you can sometimes see in the skies – but can also disrupt satellite operations, shut down the electric grid and expose astronauts aboard future crewed missions to the Moon and Mars to lethal doses of radiation.

I’m a heliophysicist and space weather expert, and my team is leading the development of a next-generation satellite constellation called SWIFT, which is designed to predict potentially dangerous space weather events in advance. Our goal is to forecast extreme space weather more accurately and earlier.

The dangers of space weather

Commercial interests now make up a big part of space exploration, focusing on space tourism, building satellite networks, and working toward extracting resources from the Moon and nearby asteroids.

Space is also a critical domain for military operations. Satellites provide essential capabilities for military communication, surveillance, navigation and intelligence.

As countries such as the U.S. grow to depend on infrastructure in space, extreme space weather events pose a greater threat. Today, space weather threatens up to US$2.7 trillion in assets globally.

In September 1859, the most powerful recorded space weather event, known as the Carrington event, caused fires in North America and Europe by supercharging telegraph lines. In August 1972, another Carrington-like event nearly struck the astronauts orbiting the Moon. The radiation dose could have been fatal. More recently, in February 2022, SpaceX lost 39 of its 49 newly launched Starlink satellites because of a moderate space weather event.

Today’s space weather monitors

Space weather services heavily rely on satellites that monitor the solar wind, which is made up of magnetic field lines and particles coming from the Sun, and communicate their observations back to Earth. Scientists can then compare those observations with historical records to predict space weather and explore how the Earth may respond to the observed changes in the solar wind.

Earth’s magnetic field naturally protects living things and Earth-orbiting satellites from most adverse effects of space weather. However, extreme space weather events may compress – or in some cases, peel back – the Earth’s magnetic shield.

This process allows solar wind particles to make it into our protected environment – the magnetosphere – exposing satellites and astronauts onboard space stations to harsh conditions.

Most satellites that continuously monitor Earth-bound space weather orbit relatively close to the planet. Some satellites are positioned in low Earth orbit, about 100 miles (161 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, while others are in geosynchronous orbit, approximately 25,000 miles (40,000 km) away.

At these distances, the satellites remain within Earth’s protective magnetic shield and can reliably measure the planet’s response to space weather conditions. However, to more directly study incoming solar wind, researchers use additional satellites located farther upstream – hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth.

The U.S., the European Space Agency and India all operate space weather monitoring satellites positioned around the L1 Lagrange point – nearly 900,000 miles (1,450,000 km) from Earth – where the gravitational forces of the Sun and Earth balance. From this vantage point, space weather monitors can provide up to 40 minutes of advance warning for incoming solar events.

Advance warning for space weather

Increasing the warning time beyond 40 minutes – the current warning time – would help satellite operators, electric grid planners, flight directors, astronauts and Space Force officers better prepare for extreme space weather events.

For instance, during geomagnetic storms, the atmosphere heats up and expands, increasing drag on satellites in low Earth orbit. With enough advance warning, operators can update their drag calculations to prevent satellites from descending and burning up during these events. With the updated drag calculations, satellite operators could use the satellites’ propulsion systems to maneuver them higher up in orbit.

Airlines could change their routes to avoid exposing passengers and staff to high radiation doses during geomagnetic storms. And future astronauts on the way to or working on the Moon or Mars, which lack protection from these particles, could be alerted in advance to take cover.

Aurora lovers would also appreciate having more time to get to their favorite viewing destinations.

The Space Weather Investigation Frontier

My team and I have been developing a new space weather satellite constellation, named the Space Weather Investigation Frontier. SWIFT will, for the first time, place a space weather monitor beyond the L1 point, at 1.3 million miles (2.1 million kilometers) from Earth. This distance would allow scientists to inform decision-makers of any Earth-bound space weather events up to nearly 60 minutes before arrival.

Satellites with traditional chemical and electric propulsion systems cannot maintain an orbit at that location – farther from Earth and closer to the Sun – for long. This is because they would need to continuously burn fuel to counteract the Sun’s gravitational pull.

To address this issue, our team has spent decades designing and developing a new propulsion system. Our solution is designed to affordably reach a distance that is closer to the Sun than the traditional L1 point, and to operate there reliably for more than a decade by harnessing an abundant and reliable resource – sunlight.

SWIFT would use a fuelless propulsion system called a solar sail to reach its orbit. A solar sail is a hair-thin reflective surface – simulating a very thin mirror – that spans about a third of a football field. It balances the force of light particles coming from the Sun, which pushes it away, with the Sun’s gravity, which pulls it inward.

While a sailboat harnesses the lift created by wind flowing over its curved sails to move across water, a solar sail uses the momentum of photons from sunlight, reflected off its large, shiny sail, to propel a spacecraft through space. Both the sailboat and solar sail exploit the transfer of energy from their respective environments to drive motion without relying on traditional propellants.

A solar sail could enable SWIFT to enter an otherwise unstable sub-L1 orbit without the risk of running out of fuel.

NASA successfully launched its first solar sail in 2010. This in-space demonstration, named NanoSail-D2, featured a 107-square-foot (10 m² ) sail and was placed in low Earth orbit. That same year, the Japanese Space Agency launched a larger solar sail mission, IKAROS, which deployed a 2,110 ft² (196 m² ) sail in the solar wind and successfully orbited Venus.

The Planetary Society and NASA followed up by launching two sails in low Earth orbit: LightSail, with an area of 344 ft² (32 m² ), and the advanced composite solar sail system, with an area of 860 ft² (80 m² ).

The SWIFT team’s solar sail demonstration mission, Solar Cruiser, will be equipped with a much larger sail – it will have area of 17,793 ft² (1,653 m² ) and launch as early as 2029. We successfully deployed a quadrant of the sail on Earth early last year.

To transport it to space, the team will meticulously fold and tightly pack the sail inside a small canister. The biggest challenge to overcome will be deploying the sail once in space and using it to guide the satellite along its orbital path.

If successful, Solar Cruiser will pave the way for SWIFT’s constellation of four satellites. The constellation would include one satellite equipped with sail propulsion, set to be placed in an orbit beyond L1, and three smaller satellites with chemical propulsion in orbit at the L1 Lagrange point.

The satellites will be indefinitely parked at and beyond L1, collecting data in the solar wind without interruption. Each of the four satellites can observe the solar wind from different locations, helping scientists better predict how it may evolve before reaching Earth.

As modern life depends more on space infrastructure, continuing to invest in space weather prediction can protect both space- and ground-based technologies.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

About 24,000 elephants live in Namibia, a southwest African country known for its desert landscapes and wildlife parks. Most of them dwell in the lush greenery of Etosha National Park in the north of the country and near the border with Botswana in the northeast.

But over the centuries, smaller groups of elephants have ventured into and learned to survive in the more arid plains in the western Kunene region. These elephants fascinate zoologists for their ability to handle the harsh weather conditions in the area, including strong, ice-cold winds and alternating droughts and heavy rains.

"Somehow, these elephants know when the winds are coming before they come," Christin Winter, Conservation Program Manager at Namibia's Elephant-Human Relations Aid (EHRA) charity, told Space.com. "They know where to hide from it; they know where water will pool when it rains because they remember it from previous seasons."

But the extreme conditions are also forcing these elephants to approach human settlements. When droughts hit, elephants have no choice but to share water resources with humans, despite knowing all too well that people equal mortal danger.

Before the Namibian war of independence, which raged from the mid-1960s until the end of the 1980s, locals in the deserts of western Namibia knew how to live with elephants. But poaching for meat and ivory decimated the population so much that the elephants disappeared during the war. They began returning in the 1990s, but by then, social change erased the traditional knowledge. New settlers came into the region and brought with them many misconceptions about the giant mammals.

"There is a lot of fear and folklore around elephants — for example, that they eat people," Winter said. "But there have been other problems. Elephants could break infrastructure, even damage houses. If you bump into them at night and you don't know what to do, it can get dangerous."

Local farmers frequently resort to defending their property with brute force. Elephants get shot at, wandering off wounded and dying in the fields. From a population that once counted around 3,000, only 150 animals remain in the region today.

"Over half of the local population of desert elephants was lost within a few years," Winter said. "It has stabilized a bit, but there are also other environmental pressures that prevent calves from surviving. We have a very low number of adult elephants and very few teenagers, which is obviously not great."

In a bid to help locals coexist with the magnificent species without either side suffering harm, the researchers fitted three elephants in the most affected group with GPS collars in 2021 to track their movements. Whenever an elephant approaches a village or farm, the "Earth Ranger" system generates an alert that gets shared with the community in real time.

Since the roll-out of the geofencing system, the number of incidents involving humans decreased, Winter said. To make things even better, the researchers are trying to combine the GPS tracking data with high-resolution images from Airbus' Pleiades Neo satellites to understand why and when the elephants visit villages and farms. They collected data during the droughts and the subsequent rainy season to understand how the elephants' movement patterns change throughout the year.

"The elephants will choose a place even within a risky environment where they feel the safest and where there is vegetation and water," Winter said. "When there is enough water and food, that for them outmatches the risk of dying from shooting, which surprised us. They are willing to risk the consequences."

Known for their impeccable memory, the elephants remember the tragedies that people inflicted on their families, Winter said. They only approach villages at night and move almost "like ghosts," running away at the first hint of human presence.

The researchers hope the satellite data may help design new strategies to make human-elephant coexistence easier.

"We are trying to protect the natural water points and place troughs and dams strategically so that the elephants don't need to go through the villages at night," Winter said.

The satellite images help identify elephant hotspots, which then enables the researchers to negotiate with farmers.

"The big aim is to identify corridors and find ways to protect that habitat for the elephants," Winter said. "We had one farmer who saw the data and realized that one corner of his farm was almost owned by the elephants, and he allowed us to have that corner in exchange for protecting the rest of his farm. With compromises like that, we can reduce the conflict and give the elephants a safe spot to be."

The massive ice sheet, located in a remote region of northern Greenland, harbors a subglacial lake that appears to have flooded in 2014, releasing 23.8 billion gallons (90 million cubic meters) of meltwater over the course of 10 days — roughly equivalent to nine hours of peak flow over Niagara Falls.

The meltwater from the subglacial lake surged upwards, the satellites showed, bursting through the ice surface. The rapid flooding that followed carved a crater 279 feet (85 meters) deep and 0.77 square miles (2 square kilometers) wide into the surface of the ice sheet. The flood’s upward force also lifted blocks of ice 82 feet (25 meters) above the surface and left behind deep fractures and scoured markings, according to a statement from the European Space Agency (ESA).

"The existence of subglacial lakes beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet is still a relatively recent discovery, and — as our study shows — there is still much we don't know about how they evolve and how they can impact on the ice sheet system," Jade Bowling, lead author of the study from Lancaster University, said in the statement. "Importantly, our work demonstrates the need to better understand how often they drain, and, critically, what the consequences are for the surrounding ice sheet."

This startling event was discovered using data from multiple Earth-observing satellites, including ESA's CryoSat, the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 missions, and NASA's ICESat-2, as well as 3D models of the ice sheet surface from the ArcticDEM project. The amount of meltwater released from underneath the ice in 2014 is considered one of the largest recorded subglacial floods in Greenland, according to the statement.

Beyond revealing the dramatic surface changes, the satellite data has reshaped scientists' understanding of how water behaves under ice. Previously, scientists believed meltwater generally flowed down from the surface to the ice base, eventually draining into the ocean. This study shows that water can also flow upward, forced through the ice by intense pressure, even in areas previously thought to have frozen beds.

This upward surge of water fractured the overlying ice sheet, creating new channels for the water to escape. This kind of upward water flow could affect how ice sheets respond to a warming world, which has not yet been accounted for in current climate models. Understanding these processes is key to improving predictions of Greenland’s contribution to future sea-level rise, the researchers said.

Their findings were published on Wednesday (July 30) in the journal Nature Geoscience.