As hundreds of new satellites are being added to low Earth orbit every year, the risk of debris—and the millions of dollars of economic damage it can cause—is ever-increasing. It’s a risk that’s constantly on Dan Ceperley’s mind. On Wednesday, the company announced that it’s expanding its radar system to the Azores in Portugal, which will help widen the view of the company’s tracking systems and enable it to track even more debris in orbit.

Why SpaceX, LeoLabs, and GHGSat top our 2021 list of the biggest innovators in the space industry.

Space is getting increasingly crowded, and with a number of companies putting constellations of hundreds of satellites into low Earth orbit in the coming years, ensuring that they don’t collide with each other – or an old bit of space junk — is increasingly important. That’s where Menlo Park, Calif.-based LeoLab’s automated collision avoidance system comes into play.

LeoLabs announced plans July 22 to construct a phased-array radar in Costa Rica to track objects as small as two centimeters across in low inclination orbits. The Costa Rican radar “fills a gap because with an equatorial radar we can track all orbits,” Ed Lu, former NASA astronaut and LeoLabs co-founder, told SpaceNews.

LeoTrack, delivered as a web-based subscription, offers satellite operators a full range of monitoring capabilities, including precision tracking of satellites, orbital state vectors, predictive radar availability, scheduled passes, and real-time orbit visualization for constellations as well as individual satellites.

Aviation Week Network announced today the winners of the 63rd Annual Laureate Awards, honoring extraordinary achievements in the global aerospace arena. The 2020 Laureate Awards will take place on March 12, 2020 at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.

Remember that scene in Gravity when Sandra Bullock goes spinning off into space after her shuttle is struck by debris? Space junk is a very real problem astronauts face, and @LeoLabs_Space is working to track it.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The New Zealand Space Agency is moving quickly to develop a comprehensive strategy reflecting its priorities including sustainability, agility and collaboration, said agency head Peter Crabtree.

The Kiwi Space Radar — built by California-based LeoLabs in Naseby in the past year — was opened yesterday in front of an international audience that heard New Zealand’s space sector was growing rapidly in size and value.

Satellite collisions should become less common thanks to a radar station that has been built on a farm near Naseby in Central Otago to track hundreds of thousands of pieces of space junk.