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Reference Terms
from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Satellite

A satellite is any object that orbits another object (which is known as its primary). Satellites can be manmade or may be naturally occurring such as moons, comets, asteroids, planets, stars, and even galaxies. All masses that are part of our solar system, including the Earth and Sun, are satellites of either a planet, the Sun, or the galactic center of the Milky Way.

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Space & Time News

February 2, 2026

NASA’s Perseverance rover has just made history by driving across Mars using routes planned by artificial intelligence instead of human operators. A vision-capable AI analyzed the same images and terrain data normally used by rover planners, ...
Hidden lava tunnels on the Moon and Mars could one day shelter human explorers, offering natural protection from radiation and space debris. A European research team has unveiled a bold new mission concept that uses three different robots working ...
Low-Earth orbit is more crowded—and fragile—than it looks. Satellites constantly weave past each other, burning fuel and making dozens of evasive maneuvers every year just to stay safe. A major solar storm could disable navigation and ...
Physicists have unveiled a new way to simulate a mysterious form of dark matter that can collide with itself but not with normal matter. This self-interacting dark matter may trigger a dramatic collapse inside dark matter halos, heating and ...
When scientists sent bacteria-infecting viruses to the International Space Station, the microbes did not behave the same way they do on Earth. In microgravity, infections still occurred, but both viruses and bacteria evolved differently over time. ...
A team of physicists has discovered a surprisingly simple way to build nuclear clocks using tiny amounts of rare thorium. By electroplating thorium onto steel, they achieved the same results as years of work with delicate crystals — but far more ...
Nearly everything in the universe is made of mysterious dark matter and dark energy, yet we can’t see either of them directly. Scientists are developing detectors so sensitive they can spot particle interactions that might occur once in years or ...
A distant pulsar’s radio signal flickers as it passes through space, much like stars twinkle in Earth’s atmosphere. By monitoring this effect for 10 months, researchers watched the pattern slowly evolve as gas, Earth, and the pulsar all moved. ...
Mars looks familiar from afar, but surviving there means creating a protective oasis in a hostile world. Instead of shipping construction materials from Earth, researchers are exploring how to use Martian soil as the raw ingredient. Two tough ...
A physicist has proposed a bold experiment that could allow gravitational waves to be manipulated using laser light. By transferring minute amounts of energy between light and gravity, the ...
As we age, our immune system quietly loses its edge, and scientists have uncovered a surprising reason why. A protein called platelet factor 4 naturally declines over time, allowing blood stem cells to multiply too freely and drift toward unhealthy, ...
Scientists are digging into the hidden makeup of carbon-rich asteroids to see whether they could one day fuel space exploration—or even be mined for valuable resources. By analyzing rare meteorites ...

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