Latest news with #LeoLabs
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Space Force eyes commercial tech to fill low Earth orbit sensing gaps
The Space Force recently launched a survey of the commercial marketplace for companies that can track and characterize activities in low Earth orbit. As more commercial and government satellites launch to LEO, the service has a growing need for visibility in the domain, which resides about 1,200 miles above the Earth's surface. In a May 16 notice, the service calls for information from firms that can provide space domain awareness in the 'increasingly congested orbital environment.' Specifically, the service wants these systems to provide better insight into 'objects of interest' and real-time assessment of potential conjunctions. It also wants data that can be used to quickly investigate anomalies in LEO to understand if measures need to be taken to protect U.S. space assets. 'The goal is to identify commercial vendors offering sensors as a service, today or in the future, with a capability for individual sensor tasking directly from a pre-existing U.S. government mission application layer,' the service said. 'The government is particularly interested in solutions that prioritize data quality, verification, and traceability to ensure the reliability of information used in time-critical decision-making processes.' The mission application layer referenced in the notice is a software capability that provides information about the environment to inform military operators as they direct and task commercial sensors. The call for LEO-based space domain awareness follows a similar push from the Space Force to identify commercial capabilities in geosynchronous orbit, known as GEO, which sits at a higher altitude than LEO and is where many of the service's high-value systems reside. In early 2024, the service sought input from private sector firms on whether their GEO sensing systems could augment the existing government-owned satellites that make up its Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program, or GSSAP constellation. That market research led the service to craft an acquisition plan for a commercial GEO-based space domain awareness architecture. The service approved the initial plan in late April and is now fleshing out a more detailed strategy, including how to make the system available at an unclassified level to U.S. allies. The Space Force has several ongoing initiatives to leverage the growing marketplace of LEO-based services. In 2023, it selected a pool of 16 vendors to provide a range of services as part of its Proliferated Low Earth Orbit program. The contract initially had a ceiling of $900 million but has since grown to $13 billion in response to demand from military users. In the space domain awareness area, a number of startups — including ExoAnalytic Solutions, LeoLabs and Slingshot Aerospace — are offering a range of capabilities, from AI tracking tools to mobile, ground-based radars. The May 16 notice doesn't state preference for either space-based or ground-based systems, but it notes that the service has a particular need for more positional data as well as electro-optical and active and passive radio frequency observations.
Sydney Morning Herald
08-05-2025
- Science
- Sydney Morning Herald
A Soviet space probe will crash back to Earth. It could land in Australia
'I'm not worried – I'm not telling all my friends to go to the basement for this,' said Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a company that tracks objects in orbit and monitors Kosmos-482 six times a day. 'Usually about once a week we have a large object reenter Earth's atmosphere where some remnants of it will survive to the ground.' When will Kosmos-482 come back to Earth? Estimates change daily, but the predicted days of re-entry are currently this weekend. One calculation of the window by The Aerospace Corp, a US-government supported non-profit that tracks space debris, suggests 1:37pm Saturday AEST – plus or minus 16 hours. Marco Langbroek, a scientist and satellite tracker at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who has tracked Kosmos-482 for years, puts the estimate closer to 5:51pm AEST, plus or minus about 20 hours. Where will it land? No one knows. 'And we won't know until after the fact,' McDowell said. That's because Kosmos-482 is hurtling through space at more than 27,000km/h, and it will be going that fast until atmospheric friction pumps the brakes. So getting the timing wrong by even a half-hour means the spacecraft will re-enter more than half a world away, in a different spot. What's known is that Kosmos-482's orbit places it between 52 degrees north latitude and 52 degrees south latitude, which covers Africa, Australia, most of the Americas and much of south- and mid-latitude Europe and Asia. 'There are three things that can happen when something reenters: a splash, a thud or an ouch,' McKnight said. 'A splash is really good,' he said, and may be most likely because so much of Earth is covered in oceans. He said the hope was to avoid the 'thud' or the 'ouch'. Will the spacecraft survive impact? Assuming Kosmos-482 survives re-entry – and it should, as long as its heat shield is intact – the spacecraft will be going about 240km/h when it smashes into whatever it smashes into, Langbroek calculated. 'I don't think there's going to be a lot left afterward,' McDowell said. 'Imagine putting your car into a wall at 150 miles an hour [241km/h] and seeing how much of it is left.' The heat of re-entry should make Kosmos-482 visible as a bright streak through the sky if its return occurs over a populated area at night. If pieces of the spacecraft survive and are recovered, they legally belong to Russia. 'Under the law, if you find something, you have an obligation to return it,' said Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Centre for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi. 'Russia is considered to be the registered owner and therefore continues to have jurisdiction and control over the object.' How do we know the identity of this object? Some 25 years ago, McDowell was going through the North American Aerospace Defence Command's catalogue of about 25,000 orbital objects and trying to pin an identity on each. 'Most of them, the answer is, 'Well, this is a piece of exploded rocket from something fairly boring',' he recalls. Loading But one of them, object 6073, was a bit odd. Launched in 1972 from Kazakhstan, it ended up in a highly elliptical orbit, travelling between 200 and 10,000 kilometres from Earth. As he studied its orbit and size, McDowell surmised it must be the wayward Kosmos-482 lander – not just a piece of debris from the failed launch. The conclusion was supported by observations from the ground, as well as a recently declassified Soviet document.
The Age
08-05-2025
- Science
- The Age
A Soviet space probe will crash back to Earth. It could land in Australia
'I'm not worried – I'm not telling all my friends to go to the basement for this,' said Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a company that tracks objects in orbit and monitors Kosmos-482 six times a day. 'Usually about once a week we have a large object reenter Earth's atmosphere where some remnants of it will survive to the ground.' When will Kosmos-482 come back to Earth? Estimates change daily, but the predicted days of re-entry are currently this weekend. One calculation of the window by The Aerospace Corp, a US-government supported non-profit that tracks space debris, suggests 1:37pm Saturday AEST – plus or minus 16 hours. Marco Langbroek, a scientist and satellite tracker at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who has tracked Kosmos-482 for years, puts the estimate closer to 5:51pm AEST, plus or minus about 20 hours. Where will it land? No one knows. 'And we won't know until after the fact,' McDowell said. That's because Kosmos-482 is hurtling through space at more than 27,000km/h, and it will be going that fast until atmospheric friction pumps the brakes. So getting the timing wrong by even a half-hour means the spacecraft will re-enter more than half a world away, in a different spot. What's known is that Kosmos-482's orbit places it between 52 degrees north latitude and 52 degrees south latitude, which covers Africa, Australia, most of the Americas and much of south- and mid-latitude Europe and Asia. 'There are three things that can happen when something reenters: a splash, a thud or an ouch,' McKnight said. 'A splash is really good,' he said, and may be most likely because so much of Earth is covered in oceans. He said the hope was to avoid the 'thud' or the 'ouch'. Will the spacecraft survive impact? Assuming Kosmos-482 survives re-entry – and it should, as long as its heat shield is intact – the spacecraft will be going about 240km/h when it smashes into whatever it smashes into, Langbroek calculated. 'I don't think there's going to be a lot left afterward,' McDowell said. 'Imagine putting your car into a wall at 150 miles an hour [241km/h] and seeing how much of it is left.' The heat of re-entry should make Kosmos-482 visible as a bright streak through the sky if its return occurs over a populated area at night. If pieces of the spacecraft survive and are recovered, they legally belong to Russia. 'Under the law, if you find something, you have an obligation to return it,' said Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Centre for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi. 'Russia is considered to be the registered owner and therefore continues to have jurisdiction and control over the object.' How do we know the identity of this object? Some 25 years ago, McDowell was going through the North American Aerospace Defence Command's catalogue of about 25,000 orbital objects and trying to pin an identity on each. 'Most of them, the answer is, 'Well, this is a piece of exploded rocket from something fairly boring',' he recalls. Loading But one of them, object 6073, was a bit odd. Launched in 1972 from Kazakhstan, it ended up in a highly elliptical orbit, travelling between 200 and 10,000 kilometres from Earth. As he studied its orbit and size, McDowell surmised it must be the wayward Kosmos-482 lander – not just a piece of debris from the failed launch. The conclusion was supported by observations from the ground, as well as a recently declassified Soviet document.
New York Post
29-04-2025
- Science
- New York Post
Russian satellite linked to nuclear weapons program is spinning out of control
A secret Russian satellite that US officials believe is linked to Russia's nuclear weapons program appears to be spinning uncontrollably in space, in a major blow for Moscow, according to American analysts. The Cosmos 2553 satellite, which was launched by Russia weeks before invading Ukraine in 2022, has been tumbling in space for the past year, suggesting it may no longer be functioning, according to Doppler radar data from space-tracking firm LeoLabs and optical data from Slingshot Aerospace. The Cosmos was at the center of allegations from the US that Russia was developing a nuclear weapon capable of destroying entire satellite networks in space, including SpaceX's Starlink system that Ukrainian troops have relied on to fight Moscow's invasion. Advertisement The US has accused Russia of launching secret satellites aimed at building a nuclear weapon capable of eliminating entire satellite systems in space. REUTERS LeoLabs, which detected errant movements from the satellite last year, now has 'high confidence' that the Cosmos is spinning out of control, Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at the company, told Reuters. The satellite was notably flying in a relatively isolated orbit some 1,200 miles above the Earth in a known hotspot of cosmic radiation that normal satellites typically avoid. Advertisement The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, said the findings from LeoLabs show clear evidence that the Russian satellite 'is no longer operational.' Slingshot, however, said that the Cosmos appears to have recently stabilized after the company first detected the tumbling pattern last May. Satellites have become key to Russia, America and China's space programs for military and intelligence operations. dimazel – Russia's Ministry of Defense, which denied allegations that Cosmos was linked to its nuclear weapons program, has yet to comment on the findings from the American analysts. Advertisement US Space Command, which condemned the launch of Russia's military satellites, has also remained silent on the findings. Although not a weapon itself, Cosmos 2553 was believed to aid Russia's development of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon. The Cosmos is one of dozens of Russia's military satellites, with Moscow investing billions in strengthening its space capabilities for military and intelligence purposes as the war with Ukraine continues. Advertisement Washington and Beijing have also followed suit to bolster their own secretive satellite programs, raising concerns about a future where space conflicts and satellite attacks become the norm. The Biden administration warned last year that the Cosmos was just the start of Moscow's ambitions, with Russia allegedly 'considering the incorporation of nuclear weapons into its counterspace programs.' With Post wires
TimesLIVE
29-04-2025
- Science
- TimesLIVE
Russian satellite linked to nuclear weapon programme ‘out of control': US
The secretive Russian satellite in space that US officials believe is connected to a nuclear anti-satellite weapon programme has appeared to be spinning uncontrollably, suggesting it may no longer be functioning, in what could be a setback for Moscow's space weapon efforts, according to US analysts. The Cosmos 2553 satellite, launched by Russia weeks before invading Ukraine in 2022, has had bouts of what appears to be errant spinning over the past year, according to Doppler radar data from space-tracking firm LeoLabs and optical data from Slingshot Aerospace shared with Reuters. Believed to be a radar satellite for Russian intelligence and a radiation testing platform, the satellite last year became the centre of US allegations that Russia for years has been developing a nuclear weapon capable of destroying entire satellite networks, such as SpaceX's Starlink internet system that Ukrainian troops have been using. US officials assess Cosmos 2553's purpose, though not itself a weapon, is to aid Russia's development of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon. Russia has denied it is developing such a weapon and said Cosmos 2553 is for research purposes. Russia, which launched the first man in space in 1961, has for decades been locked in a security race in space with the US that, in recent years, has intensified and seeped into public view as Earth's orbit becomes a hotspot for private sector competition and military technologies aiding ground forces. The Cosmos 2553 satellite has been in a relatively isolated orbit 2,000km above Earth, parked in a hotspot of cosmic radiation that communications and Earth-observing satellites typically avoid.
