Launch Activities & Milestones The summer of 2025 saw rocket launch activity reach unprecedented levels, marked by record-breaking cadence and new milestones across the globe. SpaceX continued to push the envelope of rapid, reusable launch operations, achieving its 500th Falcon 9 mission in early July. This overnight Starlink launch not only marked Falcon 9’s 500th…
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This Week in Space: Reusable Rockets, Interstellar Visitors, and the Future of Earth Observation The past week has seen a torrent of developments across the space sector, from Europe’s push toward reusable launchers and the detection of a new interstellar object, to the sobering loss of a major climate-monitoring satellite. As the world’s eyes turn…
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BIOMASS uses a fully polarimetric P-band SAR with a 70 cm wavelength to pierce through canopies and measure woody trunks where most forest carbon is stored. The 12-meter deployable reflector, shaped like an umbrella and built by L3Harris, directs radar pulses back to the sensor. The 1.25-tonne spacecraft was launched on 29 April 2025 aboard…
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Sentinel-1 radar imaged the aftermath of Cyclone Idai in Mozambique in 2019 and revealed approximately 2,165 km² of flooding around the coastal city of Beira. Idai’s satellite flood maps pinpointed about 400,000 people stranded and helped allocate rescue resources. NOAA’s GOES weather satellites monitored Hurricane Dorian in 2019 as it approached the Bahamas, providing real-time…
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NASA’s Hyperion, launched in 2000 on the EO-1 satellite, collected 220 spectral bands from 400 to 2500 nm at 30 m resolution. A hyperspectral data cube stacks hundreds of narrow wavelength bands for every ground pixel, creating a two-dimensional spatial image plus a spectral dimension. Hyperspectral imaging records hundreds of narrow bands (often 10 nm…
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About 75% of the planet is obscured by cloud cover or darkness at any moment, making optical imaging inaccessible. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites actively illuminate the ground with microwave radar and synthesize a large aperture by moving the antenna to produce high-resolution images. SAR can operate day or night and in all weather, providing…
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