Kosmos 2421 (Cosmos 2421) was a Russian spy satellite launched in 2006, but began fragmenting in early 2008.
[Orbital Debris Quarterly News - Volume 12 Issue 3]
/ref> It also had the Konus-A science payload designed by Ioffe Institute
The Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (for short, Ioffe Institute, russian: Физико-технический институт им. А. Ф. Иоффе) is one of Russia's largest research centers specialized ...
to detect gamma-ray bursts. Three separate fragmentation events produced about 500 pieces of trackable debris.[ About half of those had already re-entered Earth's atmosphere by the fall of 2008.
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Satellite life span
Kosmos 2421 was launched on June 25, 2006 on a Tsyklon-2
The Tsyklon-2 (Cyclone-2), also known as Tsiklon-2 and Tsyklon-M (known as SL-11 by the United States DoD), GRAU index 11K69, was a Soviet, later Ukrainian, orbital carrier rocket used from the 1960s to the late 2000s.
The rocket had 106 launch ...
from LC90 at Baykonur.[ It is a US-PU/Legenda type satellite, and was in a 65 degree, 93 minute circular orbit 410–430 km up.][ The main body of the satellite finally re-entered and burned up on 19 August 2010.][
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Space station maneuver
On August 27, 2008, the International Space Station
The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest modular space station currently in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA ( ...
(ISS) fired the boosters of the Jules Verne automated transfer vehicle to avoid debris fragment 33246 from the remains of Kosmos 2421.[Orbital Debris Quarterly News - Volume 12 Issue 4]
/ref> Without a change, that piece was predicted to have a 1 in 72 chance of hitting the station.[ Kosmos 2421 had been in a higher orbit than ISS, so when ISS's apogee (high point of orbit) surpassed the debris field's perigee (low point of orbit), many fragments would cross ISS's orbit.][
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See also
* Space debris
* Fengyun-1C
On 11 January 2007, China conducted an anti-satellite missile test. A Chinese weather satellite—the FY-1C (COSPAR 1999-025A) polar orbit satellite of the Fengyun series, at an altitude of , with a mass of —was destroyed by a kinetic kill ve ...
* 2009 satellite collision
On February 10, 2009, two communications satellites—the active commercial Iridium 33 and the derelict Russian military Kosmos 2251—accidentally collided at a speed of and an altitude of above the Taymyr Peninsula in Siberia. It was the fi ...
(Kosmos 2251
Kosmos-2251 (russian: Космос-2251 meaning ''Cosmos 2251''), was a Russian Strela-2M military communications satellite. It was launched into Low Earth orbit from Site 132/1 at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome at 04:17 UTC on 16 June 1993, by a Kos ...
and Iridium 33
Iridium 33 was a communications satellite launched by Russia for Iridium Communications. It was launched into low Earth orbit from Site 81/23 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 01:36 UTC on 14 September 1997, by a Proton-K rocket with a Block DM2 up ...
)
* Kosmos 954
* List of space debris producing events
References
External links
IEEE - The Growing Threat of Space Debris
The Threat of Orbital Debris and Protecting NASA Space Assets from Satellite Collisions
Kosmos satellites
Spacecraft launched in 2006
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