A Chinese anti-satellite test destroys the Fengyun-1C weather satellite

Assembled from 20 blocks · 1 evidence · 14 related

1. Story
2. A kinetic interceptor destroyed a defunct Chinese weather satellite at an altitude of roughly 860 kilometres, creating the largest single debris-generating event in the history of spaceflight — several thousand catalogued fragments, plus a far larger untracked population. The altitude is what made it consequential: atmospheric drag at that height removes objects over centuries rather than years, so the fragments will remain a hazard to sun-synchronous Earth observation orbits for generations.
3. Knowledge
4. Orbital debris
5. A Chinese anti-satellite test destroys the Fengyun-1C weather satellite
6. Connections
7. Orbital debris
8. Low Earth orbit broadband constellations
9. Low Earth orbit broadband constellations
10. The Kessler collision cascade
11. The FCC five-year post-mission disposal rule
12. Kessler and Cour-Palais publish the collision cascade argument
13. A Chinese anti-satellite test destroys the Fengyun-1C weather satellite
14. The UN adopts voluntary space debris mitigation guidelines
15. Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 collide
16. The first sixty Starlink satellites are deployed
17. A Russian anti-satellite test destroys Cosmos 1408
18. The FCC adopts a five-year post-mission disposal rule
19. Evidence
20. 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.