A Russian anti-satellite test destroys Cosmos 1408

Assembled from 28 blocks · 2 evidence · 21 related

1. Story
2. A direct-ascent interceptor destroyed a defunct Soviet-era satellite at an altitude of roughly 480 kilometres, generating on the order of fifteen hundred catalogued fragments and a much larger untracked cloud. The International Space Station crew sheltered in their return vehicles as the debris field passed. Coming after two decades of voluntary mitigation guidelines, the test showed both the limits of the voluntary regime and the fact that the largest single-event contributions to the debris population have been deliberate acts by states, not commercial accidents.
3. Knowledge
4. Orbital debris
5. International Space Station
6. A Russian anti-satellite test destroys Cosmos 1408
7. Connections
8. Orbital debris
9. International Space Station
10. Low Earth orbit broadband constellations
11. Low Earth orbit broadband constellations
12. The Kessler collision cascade
13. The FCC five-year post-mission disposal rule
14. Kessler and Cour-Palais publish the collision cascade argument
15. A Chinese anti-satellite test destroys the Fengyun-1C weather satellite
16. The UN adopts voluntary space debris mitigation guidelines
17. Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 collide
18. The first sixty Starlink satellites are deployed
19. A Russian anti-satellite test destroys Cosmos 1408
20. The FCC adopts a five-year post-mission disposal rule
21. In-space manufacturing
22. The first paying private visitor reaches the International Space Station
23. A Russian anti-satellite test destroys Cosmos 1408
24. NASA contracts for a vehicle to deorbit the International Space Station
25. International Space Station operations are planned to end
26. Evidence
27. Supports the catalogued and modelled debris population magnitudes, the altitude dependence of orbital decay, and the fragment contributions of the 2007 Fengyun-1C test, the 2009 Iridium–Cosmos collision and the 2021 Cosmos 1408 test. V55 verification basis: esa.int was refused by the network egress proxy in this session and no search was available, so counts are given as ranges and no edition-specific number is quoted.
28. Establishes voluntary, non-binding debris mitigation expectations including removal of low-Earth-orbit spacecraft within twenty-five years of mission end. V55 verification basis: the guidelines were not retrieved in this session; the adoption year and the twenty-five-year expectation are stated from author knowledge.