The US Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron, which keeps track of all artificial objects in Earth’s orbit, reports that the Kosmos 2499 satellite broke up on Saturday morning. Since orbital debris greater than 1,000 kilometers above the Earth will continue circling the planet for 100 years or more before falling back to Earth, the cloud of space junk created by the break apart might remain in the atmosphere for far over a century.Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA), claims that this is the satellite’s second breakdown after the first one on October 23, 2021.
Source: Interesting Engineering Twitter, McDowell expressed his suspicion that the recent event was the further disintegration of already disintegrated components.
According to Space.com, there are many more mysteries surrounding the spacecraft, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. In 2014, a Russian rocket vehicle launched Kosmos 2499 along with three Rodik military communications satellites. However, interestingly, RussianSpaceWeb.com notes that the satellite was not listed on the official flight manifest.
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