Meanwhile, people involved in tracking satellites are more concerned with how these spacecraft will influence an already fairly crowded space environment. Space debris already creates an intricate space highway of crisscrossing lanes of traffic in orbit, dominated by satellites moving at many thousands of miles per hour. Adding more will up the risk of collision and could make launching to space much more difficult in the future.
SpaceX has heard the complaints of concerned scientists and satellite watchers. The company has taken some steps to mitigate the astronomy problems that many fear, and it has also released more data about the positioning of its satellites to help with tracking. But those steps aren't enough for some advocates.
Quite a lot has been going on:
'Cold Neptune' and two temperate super-Earths found orbiting nearby stars -- ScienceDaily
A "cold Neptune" and two potentially habitable worlds are part of a cache of five newly discovered exoplanets and eight exoplanet candidates found orbiting nearby red dwarf stars, which are reported in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series by a team led by Carnegie's Fabo Feng and Paul Butler.
The two potentially habitable planets are orbiting GJ180 and GJ229A, which are among the nearest stars to our own Sun, making them prime targets for observations by next-generation space- and land-based telescopes. They are both super-Earths with at least 7.5 and 7.9 times our planet's mass and orbital periods of 106 and 122 days respectively.
Meet 2020 AV2, the 1st asteroid entirely within the orbit of Venus | Space | EarthSky
It’s difficult to see objects whose orbits are within that of Venus, because those objects always stay near the sun in our sky. Now, though, astronomers have spotted one!
Asteroid 2020 AV2 on January 8, 2020. The image is a composite, consisting of 14 60-second exposures, remotely collected with the Elena robotic unit available at the Virtual Telescope Project. The asteroid – 2020 AV2 – is indicated by a white arrow. Image via VirtualTelescope.eu .
LightSail 2 is Still Solar Sailing, But it's Getting Lower and Lower with Each Orbit -
LightSail 2 deployed it solar sail five months ago, and it's still orbiting Earth. It's a successful demonstration of the potential of solar sail spacecraft. Now the LightSail 2 team at The Planetary Society has released a paper outlining their findings from the mission so far.
The solar sail concept has been around for a while, all the way back to Johannes Kepler , in fact. Back in 1607 Halley's comet passed overhead, and Kepler noticed how the comet's tail streamed away from the Sun. He thought, correctly as it turns out, that sunlight was responsible. In a letter to Galileo that's kind of famous in astronomy circles, Kepler said, "Provide ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will brave even that void." Pretty cool.
Check out this next:
17-year-old high school student discovers rare new planet 3 days into NASA internship
(CBS News) - NASA's planet hunter satellite TESS has discovered an exoplanet orbiting two stars instead of one - and it was identified by a high school intern . The announcement of the circumbinary planet prompted comparisons with Luke Skywalker's home world of Tatooine in the " Star Wars " movie series, with its bewitching double sunsets.
But the newly found planet's size alone — it is 6.9 times larger than Earth, almost the size of Saturn — makes it unlikely to be livable. Named TOI 1338 b, it is the only planet in the TOI 1338 system, which lies 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Pictor, and orbits its stars every 95 days.
2 potentially habitable 'Super-Earths' and a record-setting 'Cold Neptune' found in exoplanet
The two possibly habitable worlds orbit the red dwarf stars GJ229A and GJ180, which lie about 19 light-years and 39 light-years from Earth, respectively. That's not far in the grand scheme of things, considering that our Milky Way galaxy's famous disk is about 100,000 light-years wide. (The sun's nearest neighbor star, Proxima Centauri , is about 4.2 light-years away.)
Red dwarfs , which make up about 70% of the Milky Way's stellar population, are significantly smaller and dimmer than the sun. So, these stars' "habitable zones" — the range of orbital distances where liquid water could be stable on a world's surface — lie much closer in than they do in sunlike systems.
Newly discovered asteroid inside Venus' orbit is second closest object to the sun | Fox News
Astronomers have discovered an asteroid inside Venus' orbit that not only circles the sun, but is also the second closest object to the star in the solar system, surpassing Venus itself.
Known as 2020 AV2, this space rock has the smallest aphelion (distance from the sun) and takes just 151 days to orbit the star, according to a statement released by The Virtual Telescope Project.
"Now we know that 2020 AV2 really has its orbit entirely inside that of Venus, so being the first one of this kind to be ever discovered; also, it is the natural object with the smallest known aphelion distance in our Solar System (excluding planet Mercury)," astronomer Gianluca Masi wrote in the statement. "With asteroid 2019 AQ3, discovered by the same team, 2020 AV2 has the shortest orbital period known so far in the asteroid population."
NASA's Lucy Mission Confirms Target Asteroid Eurybates Has An Orbiting Satellite
NASA has confirmed that one of the Trojan asteroids identified as Eurybates has an orbiting natural satellite. The agency intends to study the satellite further once it visits Eurybates through its upcoming Lucy mission.
The Lucy mission is scheduled to launch sometime in October 2021 with the main objective of studying the Trojan asteroids, which are space rocks that are orbiting the Sun. As part of the mission, Lucy will fly close to the asteroid Eurybates.
Happening on Twitter
SpaceX continues to blast satellites into orbit as the space community worries https://t.co/IRU4fbKfy8 https://t.co/74Vlag6Pr0 verge (from New York) Wed Jan 15 04:32:02 +0000 2020
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