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Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 collide

node

An operational American communications satellite and a defunct Russian military satellite collided at an altitude of about 790 kilometres over Siberia, at a closing speed on the order of eleven kilometres per second. It was the first accidental hypervelocity collision between two intact satellites, and it produced roughly two thousand catalogued fragments. Thirty-one years after the collision cascade was described in the literature, the mechanism was demonstrated — and the demonstration made conjunction assessment and collision avoidance a routine operating cost for every satellite operator rather than an abstraction.

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Connections · 2
Assembled narrative · 1

Assembled from 26 blocks · 1 evidence · 14 related

  1. Story
  2. An operational American communications satellite and a defunct Russian military satellite collided at an altitude of about 790 kilometres over Siberia, at a closing speed on the order of eleven kilometres per second. It was the first accidental hypervelocity collision between two intact satellites, and it produced roughly two thousand catalogued fragments. Thirty-one years after the collision cascade was described in the literature, the mechanism was demonstrated — and the demonstration made conjunction assessment and collision avoidance a routine operating cost for every satellite operator rather than an abstraction.
  3. Knowledge
  4. Orbital debris
  5. The Kessler collision cascade
  6. Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 collide
  7. Connections
  8. Orbital debris
  9. The Kessler collision cascade
  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. Orbital debris
  22. Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt
  23. Kessler and Cour-Palais publish the collision cascade argument
  24. Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 collide
  25. Evidence
  26. 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.
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/atlas?object=EVT_IRIDIUM_COSMOS_2009&experience=EVT_IRIDIUM_COSMOS_2009