It's not too often that two tropical cyclones are close enough to each other to be within a satellite's view as it tracks far above the Earth, but it happened this week with Carlos and Dolores in the Eastern Pacific Ocean.

Humanitarian aid workers responding to devastating flooding in Honduras have received assistance from space, with satellite images of affected areas provided rapidly following activation of the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters.

Satellite images captured before and after the 7-8 August clash between Georgia, South Ossetian separatists and Russia reveal that 424 civilian structures near Tskhinvali were damaged by 19 August – although they appeared intact in images taken on 10 August and earlier, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has reported.

Researchers at Queen’s University are developing a new robotic system to service more than 8,000 satellites now orbiting the Earth, beyond the flight range of ground-based repair operations. Currently, when the high-flying celestial objects malfunction – or simply run out of fuel – they become “space junk” cluttering the cosmos.

A satellite about the size of a loaf of bread will be designed and built at the University of Michigan and deployed to study space weather, thanks to a new grant from the National Science Foundation.

Satellites currently use radio waves to exchange data. Now the data rate has been increased a hundredfold by using lasers instead of radio signals. Two test satellites each carried a diode laser pump module developed with the help of Fraunhofer researchers.

An updated version of the Global Assimilation of Ionospheric Measurements (GAIM) model went operational at the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) on February 22, 2008. The operational GAIM program has been under development since 1999 by the U.S. Department of Defense and is managed by the Naval Research Laboratory’s (NRL) Space Science Division. This new version of GAIM is capable of ingesting ultraviolet (UV) data sets from DMSP satellites.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is set to launch the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite this fall as researchers try to learn more about the amount of moisture in the ground in the United States and around the world.

The solar space observatory Hinode was launched in September 2006 [1], with the name "Hinode" meaning sunrise in Japanese.

ESA's Artemis data relay satellite, controlled from Fucino (Italy) and with its mission control centre and Earth terminal located at Redu (Belgium), is providing communications between the Jules Verne ATV and the ATV Control Centre in Toulouse (France).

The Vanguard I satellite celebrates its 50th birthday this year. Its launch on March 17, 1958 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, culminated the efforts of America’s first official space satellite program begun in September 1955.

Radio waves accelerate electrons within Jupiter’s magnetic field in the same way as they do on Earth, according to new research published in Nature Physics this week. The discovery overturns a theory that has held sway for more than a generation and has important implications for protecting Earth-orbiting satellites.