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Uncontrolled spacecraft will disintegrate and generate a large amount of debris in the reentry process, and ablative debris may cause potential risks to the safety of human life and property on the ground. Therefore, predicting the landing…
The paper presents a re-entry analysis of Geosynchronous Orbit (GSO) satellites on disposal trajectories that enhance the effects of the Earth oblateness and lunisolar perturbations. These types of trajectories can lead to a natural…
Over 34,000 objects bigger than 10 cm in length are known to orbit Earth. Among them, only a small percentage are active satellites, while the rest of the population is made of dead satellites, rocket bodies, and debris that pose a…
Space debris larger than 1 cm can damage space instruments and impact Earth. The low-Earth orbits (at heights smaller than 2000 km) and orbits near the geostationary- Earth orbit (at 35786 km height) are especially endangered, because most…
The space environment around the Earth is populated by more than 130 million objects of 1 mm in size and larger, and future predictions shows that this amount is destined to increase, even if mitigation measures are implemented at a far…
The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) proposes to retrieve a near-Earth asteroid and position it in a lunar distant retrograde orbit (DRO) for later study, crewed exploration, and ultimately resource exploitation. During the Caltech Space…
The continuously growing number of objects orbiting around the Earth is expected to be accompanied by an increasing frequency of objects re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. Many of these re-entries will be uncontrolled, making their…
On February 16, 2021, an artificial object was recorded by the Spanish Meteor Network (SPMN) moving slowly over the Mediterranean. From the astrometric measurements, we identify this event as the reentry engine burn of a SpaceX Falcon 9…
The vast majority of the orbital population today is unobservable and untracked because of their small size. These lethal non-trackable objects will only become more numerous as more payloads and debris are launched into orbit and increase…
The proliferation of space debris in LEO has become a major concern for the space industry. With the growing interest in space exploration, the prediction of potential collisions between objects in orbit has become a crucial issue. It is…
Large satellite constellations are one of the main reasons for an increasing amount of mass being brought into low Earth orbit in recent years. After end of life, the satellites, as well as rocket stages, reenter Earth's atmosphere. This…
The collinear Lagrange points of the Sun-Earth system provide an ideal environment for highly sensitive space science missions. Consequently many new missions are planed by ESA and NASA that require satellites close to these points. For…
Orbital debris is a nonlinear control problem in a stratified orbital environment, not a static inventory. This paper develops a reduced-order shell-and-size framework that connects collision-rate scaling, fragment-production gain, natural…
Earth is constantly being bombarded with material from space. Most of the natural material end up being dust grains that litter the surface of Earth, but larger bodies are known to impact every few decades. The most recent large impact was…
The number of objects in orbit is rapidly increasing, primarily driven by the launch of megaconstellations, an approach to satellite constellation design that involves large numbers of satellites paired with their rapid launch and disposal.…
A set of 50,000 artificial Earth impacting asteroids was used to obtain, for the first time, information about the dominance of individual impact effects such as wind blast, overpressure shock, thermal radiation, cratering, seismic shaking,…
Since the late 1950s, when the first artificial satellite was launched, the number of Resident Space Objects has steadily increased. It is estimated that around one million objects larger than one cm are currently orbiting the Earth, with…
The evolution of the orbits of bodies ejected from the Earth, Moon, Mercury and Mars was studied. At ejection velocities about 12-14 km/s, the fraction of bodies ejected from the Earth that fall back onto the Earth was about 0.15-0.25. The…
Near-Earth objects (NEOs) have the potential to cause extensive damage and loss of life on Earth. Advancements in NEO discovery, trajectory prediction, and deflection technology indicate that an impact could be prevented, with sufficient…
Recent papers by Busza et al. (BJSW) and Dar et al. (DDH) argue that astrophysical data can be used to establish small bounds on the risk of a "killer strangelet" catastrophe scenario in the RHIC and ALICE collider experiments. DDH and…