Kosmos 954 () was a

reconnaissance satellite A reconnaissance satellite or intelligence satellite (commonly, although unofficially, referred to as a spy satellite) is an Earth observation satellite or communications satellite deployed for military or intelligence applications. The ...

launched by the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

in 1977. A malfunction prevented safe separation of its onboard

nuclear reactor A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a Nuclear fission, fission nuclear chain reaction. They are used for Nuclear power, commercial electricity, nuclear marine propulsion, marine propulsion, Weapons-grade plutonium, weapons ...

; when the satellite reentered the Earth's atmosphere the following year, it scattered radioactive debris over

northern Canada Northern Canada (), colloquially the North or the Territories, is the vast northernmost region of Canada, variously defined by geography and politics. Politically, the term refers to the three Provinces_and_territories_of_Canada#Territories, terr ...

, some of the debris landing in the

Great Slave Lake Great Slave Lake is the second-largest lake in the Northwest Territories, Canada (after Great Bear Lake), List of lakes by depth, the deepest lake in North America at , and the List of lakes by area, tenth-largest lake in the world by area. It ...

next to

Fort Resolution Fort Resolution (''Denı́nu Kų́ę́'' (pronounced "deh-nih-noo-kwenh") "moose island place") is a hamlet in the South Slave Region of the Northwest Territories, Canada. The community is situated at the mouth of the Slave River, on the shores ...

Northwest Territories The Northwest Territories is a federal Provinces and territories of Canada, territory of Canada. At a land area of approximately and a 2021 census population of 41,070, it is the second-largest and the most populous of Provinces and territorie ...

. This prompted an extensive multiyear cleanup operation known as Operation Morning Light. The Canadian government billed the Soviet Union for over 6 million

Canadian dollar The Canadian dollar (currency symbol, symbol: $; ISO 4217, code: CAD; ) is the currency of Canada. It is abbreviated with the dollar sign $. There is no standard disambiguating form, but the abbreviations Can$, CA$ and C$ are frequently used f ...

s under the terms of the

Outer Space Treaty The Outer Space Treaty, formally the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, is a Multilateralism, multilateral treaty that forms the bas ...

, which obligates states for damages caused by their space objects. The USSR eventually paid 3 million Canadian dollars in compensation.

Launch and operation

The satellite was part of the Soviet Union's

RORSAT Upravlyaemy Sputnik Aktivnyy ( for Controlled Active Satellite), or US-A, also known in the Western world as Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite or RORSAT (GRAU index 17F16K), was a series of 33 Soviet reconnaissance satellites. Launched between ...

programme, a series of reconnaissance satellites which observed ocean traffic, including surface vessels and nuclear submarines, using active

radar Radar is a system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), direction ( azimuth and elevation angles), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It is a radiodetermination method used to detect and track ...

. It was assigned the

Kosmos Cosmos generally refers to an orderly or harmonious system. Cosmos or Kosmos may also refer to: Space * ''Cosmos 1'', a privately funded solar sail spacecraft project * Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), a Hubble Space Telescope Treasury Project ...

number 954 and was launched on 18 September 1977 at 13:55 UTC from the

Baikonur Cosmodrome The Baikonur Cosmodrome is a spaceport operated by Russia within Kazakhstan. Located in the Kazakh city of Baikonur, it is the largest operational space launch facility in terms of area. All Russian Human spaceflight, crewed spaceflights are l ...

, 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 ...

carrier rocket. With an

orbital inclination Orbital inclination measures the tilt of an object's orbit around a celestial body. It is expressed as the angle between a reference plane and the orbital plane or axis of direction of the orbiting object. For a satellite orbiting the Earth ...

of 65°, a

periapsis An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. The line of apsides (also called apse line, or major axis of the orbit) is the line connecting the two extreme values. Apsides perta ...

of and

apoapsis An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. The line of apsides (also called apse line, or major axis of the orbit) is the line connecting the two extreme values. Apsides perta ...

of , it orbited the Earth every 89.5 minutes. Powered by a liquid sodium–potassium

thermionic converter A thermionic converter consists of a hot electrode which thermionically emits electrons over a potential energy barrier to a cooler electrode, producing a useful electric power output. Caesium vapor is used to optimize the electrode work functi ...

driven by a

BES-5 BES-5, also known as Bouk or Buk (), was a Soviet thermoelectric generator that was used to power 31 satellites in the US-A (RORSAT) project. The heat source was a uranium 235 fast fission nuclear reactor (FNR). Background Spacecraft nuclea ...

nuclear reactor containing around 50 kg of highly-enriched uranium (over 90%

uranium-235 Uranium-235 ( or U-235) is an isotope of uranium making up about 0.72% of natural uranium. Unlike the predominant isotope uranium-238, it is fissile, i.e., it can sustain a nuclear chain reaction. It is the only fissile isotope that exists in nat ...

), the satellite was intended for long-term on-

orbit In celestial mechanics, an orbit (also known as orbital revolution) is the curved trajectory of an object such as the trajectory of a planet around a star, or of a natural satellite around a planet, or of an artificial satellite around an ...

observation, but by December 1977 the satellite had deviated from its designed orbit and its flightpath was becoming increasingly erratic. In mid-December

North American Aerospace Defense Command North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD ; , CDAAN), known until March 1981 as the North American Air Defense Command, is a Combined operations, combined organization of the United States and Canada that provides aerospace warning, air ...

, which had assigned the satellite the

Satellite Catalog Number The Satellite Catalog Number (SATCAT), also known as NORAD Catalog Number, NORAD ID, USSPACECOM object number, is a sequential nine-digit number assigned by the United States Space Command (USSPACECOM), and previously the North American Aerospac ...

10361, noticed Kosmos 954 making erratic manoeuvres, changing the altitude of its orbit by up to 50 miles, as its Soviet operators struggled to control their failing spacecraft. In secret meetings, Soviet officials warned their US counterparts that they had lost control over the vehicle, and that the system which was intended to propel the spent

reactor core A nuclear reactor core is the portion of a nuclear reactor containing the nuclear fuel components where the nuclear reactions take place and the heat is generated. Typically, the fuel will be low-enriched uranium contained in thousands of indiv ...

into a safe

disposal orbit A graveyard orbit, also called a junk orbit or disposal orbit, is an orbit that lies away from common operational orbits. One significant graveyard orbit is a supersynchronous orbit well beyond geosynchronous orbit. Some satellites are moved into ...

had failed. At 11:53 GMT on 24 January 1978, Kosmos 954 reentered the Earth's atmosphere while travelling on a northeastward track over western Canada. At first the USSR claimed that the satellite had been completely destroyed during re-entry, but later searches showed debris from the satellite had been deposited on Canadian territory along a path from

to Baker Lake. The area spans portions of the

, present-day

Nunavut Nunavut is the largest and northernmost Provinces and territories of Canada#Territories, territory of Canada. It was separated officially from the Northwest Territories on April 1, 1999, via the ''Nunavut Act'' and the Nunavut Land Claims Agr ...

Alberta Alberta is a Provinces and territories of Canada, province in Canada. It is a part of Western Canada and is one of the three Canadian Prairies, prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to its west, Saskatchewan to its east, t ...

, and

Saskatchewan Saskatchewan is a Provinces and territories of Canada, province in Western Canada. It is bordered on the west by Alberta, on the north by the Northwest Territories, on the east by Manitoba, to the northeast by Nunavut, and to the south by the ...

Recovery

The effort to recover

radioactive Radioactive decay (also known as nuclear decay, radioactivity, radioactive disintegration, or nuclear disintegration) is the process by which an unstable atomic nucleus loses energy by radiation. A material containing unstable nuclei is conside ...

material from the satellite was dubbed Operation Morning Light. Covering a total area of , the joint Canadian–American team swept the area on foot and by air in Phase I from 24 January 1978 to 20 April 1978 and Phase II from 21 April 1978 to 15 October 1978. They were ultimately able to recover twelve large pieces of the satellite, ten of which were radioactive. These pieces displayed radioactivity of up to 1.1

sievert The sievert (symbol: SvPlease note there are two non-SI units that use the same Sv abbreviation: the sverdrup and svedberg.) is a derived unit in the International System of Units (SI) intended to represent the stochastic health risk of ionizin ...

s per hour, yet they only comprised an estimated 1% of the fuel. One fragment had a radiation level of 500 R/h, which "is sufficient to kill a person ... remaining in contact with the piece for a few hours."

Aftermath

Under the terms of the 1972

Space Liability Convention The Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects, also known as the Space Liability Convention, is a treaty from 1972 that expands on the liability rules created in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. In 1978, the crash o ...

, a state which launches an object into space is liable for damages caused by that object. For the recovery efforts, the Canadian government billed the Soviet Union

Can$ The Canadian dollar (currency symbol, symbol: $; ISO 4217, code: CAD; ) is the currency of Canada. It is abbreviated with the dollar sign $. There is no standard disambiguating form, but the abbreviations Can$, CA$ and C$ are frequently used f ...

6,041,174.70 for expenses and additional compensation for future unpredicted expenses; the USSR eventually paid Can$3 million. Kosmos 954 was not the first nuclear-powered RORSAT to fail; a launch of a similar satellite in 1973 failed, dropping its reactor into the Pacific Ocean north of Japan. Subsequently,

Kosmos 1402 Kosmos 1402 () was a Soviet spy satellite that malfunctioned, resulting in the uncontrolled re-entry of its nuclear reactor and its radioactive uranium fuel. Kosmos 1402 was launched on August 30, 1982, and re-entered the atmosphere on 23 January ...

also failed, dropping its reactor into the South Atlantic in 1983. Subsequent RORSATs were equipped with a backup core ejection mechanism. When the primary mechanism failed on Kosmos 1900 in 1988, this system succeeded in raising the core to a safe disposal orbit. Search teams did not find re-entry debris at the predicted location until they recalculated where that location would be based upon data indicating a

stratospheric The stratosphere () is the second-lowest layer of the atmosphere of Earth, located above the troposphere and below the mesosphere. The stratosphere is composed of stratified temperature zones, with the warmer layers of air located higher (c ...

warming event had been in progress during re-entry. The stratospheric warming was first documented by the US Army Meteorological Rocket Network station at Poker Flat Research Range near Fairbanks, Alaska.

Pop culture

Kosmos 954 has become a well known piece of history and lore in

Yellowknife Yellowknife is the capital, largest community, and the only city in the Northwest Territories, Canada. It is on the northern shore of Great Slave Lake, about south of the Arctic Circle, on the west side of Yellowknife Bay near the outlet of t ...

, the capital of the Northwest Territories. Yellowknife painter Nick MacIntosh has created works of art featuring the satellite and well known local landmarks. The 28 January 1978, episode of ''Saturday Night Live'' featured a

running gag A running gag, or running joke, is a literary device that takes the form of an amusing joke or a comical reference and appears repeatedly throughout a work of literature or other form of storytelling. Though they are similar, catchphrases are no ...

about the radioactive debris from the crashed satellite having created giant, mutant lobsters heading for the U.S. east coast. The story concluded with them invading the television studio at the show's end. In November of 2022, an eight-episode podcast series titled ''Operation Morning Light'' was released. It was hosted by Dëneze Nakehk'o, a veteran Yellowknife-based Dené broadcast journalist, and produced by Aliya Pabani, and discussed the impact and aftermath of Kosmos 954 on the land and peoples where the debris fell.

References

Bibliography

* * *

External links

Radiation Geophysics – Operation Morning Light – A personal account

Natural Resources Canada Natural Resources Canada (NRCan; ; )Natural Resources Canada is the applied title under the Federal Identity Program; the legal title is Department of Natural Resources (). is the department of the Government of Canada responsible for natural r ...

– a detailed first-hand account of recovering pieces of Kosmos 954; includes pictures.
Note verbale dated 19 December 1978 from the Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations
Description and location of recovered pieces. *

– Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, Yellowknife, North West Territories, Canada {{DEFAULTSORT:Kosmos 0954 Satellites formerly orbiting Earth Kosmos satellites Reconnaissance satellites of the Soviet Union Canada–Soviet Union relations 1978 in the Soviet Union Nuclear power in space 1978 disasters in Canada Nuclear accidents and incidents Disasters in the Northwest Territories Disasters in Alberta Disasters in Saskatchewan Spacecraft launched in 1977 History of Yellowknife Nuclear-powered robots