NASA and Katalyst Space attempted to use a robotic probe called LINK to grab the aging Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and push it back into a stable orbit, but the probe suffered altitude-control failures shortly after its July launch, forcing cancellation of the mission. Swift, launched in 2004, is now expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere and burn up as soon as later this year, sooner than the 2030 estimate scientists once projected.
wired.com
· 2026-09-10
Planet Labs, the San Francisco-based Earth-imaging company, maintains a public ephemerides feed that lists tracking data for its satellite fleet. A query of this data against catalog records shows 97 Planet Labs satellites currently active, spanning several constellations including the newly launched Pelican-11, which was deployed into low Earth orbit via SpaceX's Transporter 17 mission on July 7th.
tech.marksblogg.com
· 2026-09-09
A new Nature paper by Sticher et al. argues that combining satellite imagery with traditional news-coded reports could reveal aspects of armed conflict that text-based monitoring misses. For over 20 years, conflict researchers have relied on coders converting news reports into structured event data, a method with inherent blind spots where reporting is scarce or biased.
nature.com
· 2026-09-09
Longshot Space is developing what it calls the world's largest gun, a cannon that uses successive bursts of compressed gas rather than traditional rocket fuel to hurl satellites into orbit. The barrel, eventually planned to stretch for miles, is designed to gradually accelerate payloads to the speeds needed to reach space. Company representatives say the ruggedized satellites they envision could survive the launch shock, though they acknowledge the method isn't suited for delicate equipment or people.
cnet.com
· 2026-09-08
Google has released version 3 of its WeatherNext AI weather forecasting model, which now incorporates raw satellite data instead of relying solely on six-hourly reanalysis snapshots used by most AI weather systems. The update allows the model to generate hourly forecasts instead of every six hours, while also increasing spatial resolution through a larger machine-learning model, according to a newly published white paper.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-08
German startup Isar Aerospace launched its Spectrum rocket from the Andoya spaceport in Arctic Norway, marking the first orbital launch from Western European soil. The mission, carrying five small satellites and a technology experiment, served as both a vehicle qualification test and the company's first payload flight, following a failed attempt 18 months earlier.
science.slashdot.org
· 2026-09-06
xAI-affiliated SpaceXAI is giving Memphis and Southaven, Mississippi residents 50% off Starlink internet plans and waiving the upfront cost of its new V5 hardware kit, following criticism over unpermitted gas generators powering its AI data centers. About 2,000 households have signed up since the July launch, a small fraction of the roughly 250,000 households in the Memphis area. A similar promotion is running in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-05
A NASA satellite positioned nearly one million miles from Earth photographed three powerful tropical cyclones churning simultaneously in the Pacific Ocean, including category 4 and 5 storms occurring at the same time. Scientists attribute the unusual clustering to an especially strong El Niño pattern currently warming Pacific waters.
gizmodo.com
· 2026-09-04
Google DeepMind has released WeatherNext 3, an upgrade to its AI weather model that generates hourly forecasts on a 5-kilometer grid, five times finer than its predecessor. The improvement comes from feeding the model live satellite imagery and sparse weather station readings instead of relying mainly on lagging numerical prediction data.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-03
Google has released WeatherNext 3, an updated AI weather forecasting model that generates hourly predictions using live satellite observations rather than relying solely on historical data. The model can resolve certain variables like temperature and moisture at up to 5-kilometer resolution, a sharp improvement over its predecessor's 25-kilometer, 6-hourly forecasts.
theverge.com
· 2026-09-03
A roughly two-and-a-half acre island covered in mature trees suddenly appeared in Williston Lake, a reservoir in northern British Columbia, prompting officials to initially suspect the viral footage was AI-generated before satellite imagery confirmed it was real. BC Hydro spokesman Bob Gammer said record-high water levels, the highest in 14 years, likely broke loose a mass of woody debris and vegetation from the shoreline, which then drifted into open water. The island has since continued to behave unpredictably, further puzzling researchers.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-02
Geophysicist Manoochehr Shirzaei of Virginia Tech found satellite imagery from days before the 26 August flash flood near the Nepal–Tibet border showing that a glacier section and underlying rock were accelerating in the weeks leading up to the collapse. The disaster, which killed more than 1,000 people and left over 4,000 missing, may have started with a rockslide dragging the glacier down or a glacier failure destabilizing the rocks; the exact sequence remains unclear.
nature.com
· 2026-09-02
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