China launched a high-altitude satellite Monday fitted with a powerful telescope to collect nearly continuous imagery of the Asia-Pacific from geostationary orbit, an apparently unique capability that could help track foreign naval activity, according to Chinese news reports.
The European Space Agency has selected a satellite mission to monitor the health of global vegetation over an atmospheric research project to track carbon in Earth’s atmosphere, officials announced Thursday.
China launched a government-owned surveillance satellite Sunday, adding another member to the country’s reconnaissance network after liftoff on a Long March 4B booster.
China’s third Tianhui mapping satellite, built for land resource surveys and scientific research, rocketed into space Monday aboard a Long March 2D rocket, Chinese state media reported.
Your daily dose of planet Earth is now just a click away, thanks to a new NASA website hosting photos looking back at the world from a small satellite stationed almost a million miles away, realizing a dream of former Vice President Al Gore nearly two decades ago.
No one had ever lost 26 satellites at once until a launch failure bit Planet Labs last year, temporarily setting back the San Francisco startup’s ambition to map the globe every day.
Two space launches from China in a 37-hour span have placed an experimental communications satellite and a sharp-eyed Earth-viewing craft into orbit, according to Chinese state media reports.
One-half of the instrument payload aboard NASA’s $916 million Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite has failed after collecting just two months of data, NASA announced Wednesday after weeks of troubleshooting turned up no progress in recovering the sensor.
Engineers have so far been unable to restart a balky radar aboard NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive environmental satellite launched in January, robbing scientists of the most detailed maps of how much water is locked up in the top layers of Earth’s land masses.