Hey there, kids! Have you heard of Kall Morris Inc, or KMI for short? The company, located in Marquette, Michigan is working to keep the space around the earth clean and safe for everyone! 🌍✨ 

Why is this important? So, there's this stuff called orbital debris that is circling earth. It can be a big problem for satellites and rockets. 🚀 

KMI engineers have studied nature to develop a clever way to collect the debris in space and move it. They call their invention REACCH. It’s a really cool tool that can grab things in space without breaking them.

KMI has also worked with the University of Southern California and NASA to design their technology.

Students at Crestview Elementary in California and in Doral Academy in Nevada recently interviewed KMI. 🌍✨Take a look at what they learned.

If you could have peeked into LEO (low earth orbit) last month, you might have seen something interesting. Two spacecraft, an older one launched by Russia named COSMOS 2221 and another one launched by NASA called TIMED, almost collided.

The spacecraft - moving about 31,317 mph - passed each other about 65 feet apart! 😲 That’s a few feet more than from the pitcher’s plate to home base in major league baseball. ⚾️

If the spacecraft had crashed, it could have created a lot of space debris. Right now, there are about 12,000 pieces of space trash floating around up there. This almost-crash could have added 50% more space junk and would make it more risky for other satellites and spaceships with people in them.

To prevent these almost crashes, it's important to have a network of radar around the world to keep an eye on spacecraft and debris in space and make sure they don't get too close.

LeoLabs - a space company that tracks objects in orbit around the earth - worked really hard and sent messages to let people know what might happen.

There are also missions, like Astroscale’s ADRAS-J and spacecraft that KMI is working on that are designed to clean up space by removing old spacecraft and space trash.

It's important for everyone to work together and make sure space stays safe for a long, long time! 👍️ 

🤪 Word Scramble 

Solve the word scrambles by putting the mixed-up letters in the correct order. Look at the words from the news stories and unscramble them to make sense!

🗓️ What’s Ahead in air&space

word scramble answers: rocket, debris, orbital, collide, satellite, spacecraft, LEO, biomimicry