Troll: leaving the bridge behind

Trolls–remember when only billy goats had to deal with them?? Now humans have to worry about Trolls’ tolls, not just in snarky, crude comments, but in space operations. Actually, it’s only a select group of humans, and Troll, while it deals with space, is on Earth–specifically on ice (well, 300 kilometers (187.5 miles) from the […]

The mini Death Star and its song

Engadget posted a nice, short article about Telstar 1. It’s not about the song (video of it played here), which was played by the Tornados and quite popular. Both were launched in the 1960’s, the song named after the satellite. Telstar 1 looked quite a bit like a space station from a certain popular sci-fi […]

Today is the start of “World Space Week”

Yes, World Space Week! You can read more about World Space Week 2013 here. This is a United Nations (UN) declared celebration and a few events occurred on these days in history. Sputnik for one–the first man-made satellite launched into low earth orbit (just like the imagery satellites we’ve talked about in other articles) in 1957. […]

Why space matters: Imaging satellite operations, part 14—making it intelligible

I know—I promised to talk about the different colors on imagery birds (satellites) and in what applications in particular they’re used. But, someone pointed out to me that perhaps the past few lessons have been a little too space-nerd-tastic and maybe a little too difficult to understand. SO let me just try to make things […]

Sometimes it’s good to have a bulge–in space!

A few smart folks have found that the Earth’s bulge is beneficial to satellites orbiting it. In this article, they explain why a perfectly spherical Earth would’ve been bad for a lot of satellites, resulting in plenty of satellite carnage (satellites falling from orbit more quickly). But it turns out that our spinning, bulgy planet […]