Legal Insurrection by Leslie Eastman Thursday, February 9, 2023
Russian Satellite Breaks Apart in Orbit, Generating Debris Cloud That Could Last for 100 Years
In another incident, two huge pieces of Russian space junk came within 19 feet of colliding in a ‘worst-case scenario.’ The US Space Force reported that a mysterious Russian satellite broke apart early last month, generating a debris cloud that could remain in Earth orbit for years.
The Kosmos 2499 spacecraft disintegrated on the night of Jan. 3, according to the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron (18th SDS), which tracks human-made objects in orbit.
The breakup event generated at least 85 pieces of trackable debris, 18th SDS said via Twitter on Monday (opens in new tab) (Feb. 6). That cloud of space junk is orbiting 726 miles (1,169 kilometers) above Earth — so high that it’ll likely take a century or more (opens in new tab) for atmosphere drag to bring it down.
The 18th SDS did not speculate about the cause of the breakup. And that’s far from the only mystery surrounding Kosmos 2499.
And while other satellites have created larger debris fields when they have broken apart, this one is so high that it may be a century before all the bits are incinerated upon reentry to Earth’s orbit.
But the pieces of Kosmos 2499 are orbiting at an altitude of about 745 miles — so high that they’ll probably be there for a century or longer before Earth’s atmosphere drags them down and burns them up, according to NASA.
More:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/02/russian-satellite-breaks-apart-in-orbit-generating-debris-cloud-that-could-last-for-100-years/
