Kosmos 2421 (Cosmos 2421) was a Russian reconnaissance 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, ) is one of Russia's largest research centers specialized in physics and technology. The institute was established in 1918 in Petrograd (now St. ...
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.
]
Satellite life span
Kosmos 2421 was launched on June 25, 2006, on a Tsyklon-2
The Tsyklon-2 (), also known as Tsiklon-2 and Tsyklon-M (known as SL-11 by the United States United States Department of Defense, DoD), GRAU index 11K69, was a Soviet Union, Soviet, later Ukraine, Ukrainian, orbital carrier rocket used from the ...
from the Site 90/20 launch pad at Baikonur
Baikonur ( ; ) is a city in Kazakhstan on the northern bank of the Syr Darya river. It is currently leased and administered by the Russian Federation as an enclave until 2050. It was constructed to serve the Baikonur Cosmodrome with adminis ...
.[ 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.][
]
Space station maneuver
On August 27, 2008, the International Space Station
The International Space Station (ISS) is a large space station that was Assembly of the International Space Station, assembled and is maintained in low Earth orbit by a collaboration of five space agencies and their contractors: NASA (United ...
(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
Space debris (also known as space junk, space pollution, space waste, space trash, space garbage, or cosmic debris) are defunct human-made objects in spaceprincipally in Earth orbitwhich no longer serve a useful function. These include dere ...
* Fengyun-1C
* 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 f ...
(Kosmos 2251
Kosmos-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 Kosmos-3M carrier rocket. The ...
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 u ...
)
* Kosmos 954
Kosmos 954 () was a reconnaissance satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1977. A malfunction prevented safe separation of its onboard Nuclear reactor technology, nuclear reactor; when the satellite Atmospheric reentry, reentered the Earth's ...
* List of space debris producing events
A list is a set of discrete items of information collected and set forth in some format for utility, entertainment, or other purposes. A list may be memorialized in any number of ways, including existing only in the mind of the list-maker, but ...
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
{{Russia-spacecraft-stub