Lifeboat Foundation

SBUDNIC was a small cube satellite, about the size of a bread loaf, that was launched on a SpaceX rocket in May 2022.

Space junk is a serious issue that threatens the safety and sustainability of orbital activities. To address this problem, a team of students from Brown University designed and built a low-cost cube satellite that successfully deorbited itself after completing its mission. The satellite, named SBUDNIC, used a simple plastic drag sail to increase its atmospheric drag and hasten its reentry.

As per the press release, the small cube satellite has burned up high above Turkey after 445 days in orbit. Its reentry into Earth’s atmosphere on Tuesday, Aug. 8, marked the successful conclusion of a low-cost experiment aimed at reducing space debris, five years ahead of schedule.

This story is part of a new series of features on the subject of success, Benzinga Inspire.

In 2006, a young rocket-crazy kid from New Zealand traveled to the United States to show off his experiments to NASA, hoping to come away with an internship. Instead, he was escorted off the premises, so he went home, drew a logo on a napkin and started the process of building his own space company.

Changing His Trajectory: According to a CNBC report, Rocket Lab USA Inc RKLB founder and CEO Peter Beck started his own rocket company after NASA and other companies like Boeing Co BA wouldn’t give him a chance to pursue his dreams. Today, his space startup launches satellites for NASA and Rocket Lab is worth just shy of $2 billion.

WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency announced Aug. 21 it awarded contracts worth $1.5 billion to Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to build and operate 72 satellites.

The Space Development Agency (SDA), an organization under the U.S. Space Force, is building a mesh network of military satellites in low Earth orbit.

The 72 satellites will make up a portion of SDA’s network known as Tranche 2 Transport Layer. SDA is building a large constellation called the proliferated warfighter space architecture that includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites and a Tracking Layer of missile-detection and warning sensor satellites.

The satellite’s developer says it has an onboard intelligent processing unit that allows it process data without sending it back to ground controlThe company hopes it could one day be used to monitor environmental conditions or support emergency relief efforts.

A Chinese company has launched a satellite that has powerful artificial intelligence at its core, with the final aim of creating a self-controlled spaceship.

The WonderJourney-1A, or WJ-1A, which blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in Inner Mongolia earlier this month, has an onboard intelligent processing unit known as the String Edge AI Platform.

Long-distance quantum communication can be achieved by directly sending light through space using a train of orbiting satellites that function as optical lenses.

WASHINGTON — NASA selected Rocket Lab to launch a pair of cubesats in 2024 to monitor energy entering and exiting the polar regions of the planet.

NASA announced Aug. 14 it awarded a task order through its Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract to Rocket Lab for the launch of two 6U cubesats for the Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment, or PREFIRE mission.

The NASA announcement did not disclose the value of the task order. The agency stated in past awards done under VADR that the pricing is considered “proprietary” because the awards are competed in a closed environment, with only companies on the VADR contract eligible to bid on launches of taxpayer-funded missions.

Defense satellites used to be big, costly, and “juicy” targets for attack. Now the Pentagon is aiming for a more resilient network of nearly 1,000 mini orbiters.

Astronomers are calling arrays of thousands of satellites, like that of Starlink’s, “mega constellations” because of their overwhelming presence in the night sky.

Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a new giant exoplanet transiting a nearby M-dwarf star. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-4860 b, is comparable in size and mass to Saturn. The finding is reported in a paper published August 2 on the pre-print server arXiv.

TESS is conducting a survey of about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun with the aim of searching for transiting exoplanets. So far, it has identified over 6,700 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOI), of which 373 have been confirmed so far.

Now, a group of astronomers led by Jose Manuel Almenara of the Grenoble Alpes University in France, reports the confirmation of another TOI monitored by TESS. They identified a transit signal in the light curve of an M-dwarf star known as TOI-4860. The planetary nature of this signal was confirmed by ground-based follow-up photometric observations.