August 2018
Flying to the stars
... needs to have an average velocity of about eight percent of the speed of light. To give an indication of how fast this is, a spacecraft at eight percent of the speed of light would take about 15 seconds to cross the distance between the Earth...
September 2019
A new era in planetary defence missions
... near-Earth asteroids), planetary defence efforts have not risen to the level, or the budgets, of having dedicated spacecraft missions. The most immediately relevant objects for planetary defence are asteroids of an intermediate scale, ones on the...
September 2020
Tackling space debris - a global priority
... missions to perform deorbiting manoeuvres, and hence self-deorbiting is often not possible. As such, ADR by means of remover spacecraft seems to be inevitable. In the net removal method a net is deployed towards the target which is captured and then...
April 2025
Space sustainability and the role of space situational awareness
... pieces of space junk, as stated by NASA. The extra quantity of orbital debris increased collision risks with other spacecraft, including the International Space Station, and China’s Tiangong space station potentially endangering human lives. Not...