Low Earth orbit is starting to look less like pristine frontier and more like a crowded junkyard, packed with dead satellites, shattered rocket parts, and fragments from past collisions. Scientists ...

For the first time ever, scientists have observed in near real time a cloud of air pollution created as a SpaceX rocket ...

Low Earth orbit no longer feels distant or empty. On a clear November night, a Falcon 9 rose from Cape Canaveral and released 29 Starlink satellites into a busy band of sky about 340 miles up. The ...

Dots representing tracked bits of space junk encircle the planet. Most of these objects are concentrated in low Earth orbit — the region of space within 1,200 miles of the Earth's surface. - NASA ODPO ...

Scientists tracked lithium pollution from a SpaceX Falcon 9 reentry in real time, linking rocket debris to atmospheric changes using LIDAR measurements over Europe.

China routinely sends astronauts to and from its space station Tiangong. A crew capsule is about to undock from the station and return to Earth, but there's nothing routine about its journey home. The ...

High up in Earth's orbit, millions of human-made objects large and small are flying at speeds of over 15,000 miles per hour. The objects, which range from inactive satellites to fragments of equipment ...

Sometimes, what goes up doesn’t come back down — instead, it becomes a problem. Junk is accumulating in space at a fantastic pace, millions of pieces orbit the Earth, from broken satellites to lost ...