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The extensive cloud of debris Russia’s anti-satellite test created
Early this week, Russia launched a missile that destroyed the country’s Kosmos 1408 satellite, a large spacecraft that orbited the Earth roughly 300 miles up. The breakup of the satellite created at least 1,500 pieces of trackable fragments, according to the US State Department, as well as thousands of smaller pieces that cannot be tracked.
All of those pieces are still in low Earth orbit, moving at thousands of miles an hour and posing a threat to any objects that might cross their path. Initially, that even included the International Space Station, with crew members on board forced to take shelter in their spacecrafts as the debris cloud from the satellite passed by the ISS a couple of times.
It’s going to take weeks or even months to fully understand just how bad the situation is, but early visualizations of the ASAT test created by satellite trackers show an extensive trail of space debris left in the wake of the breakup.
The fragments appear like a dotted snake in orbit, stretching out and moving in roughly the same direction that Kosmos 1408 used to move around Earth. And there’s one thing the visualizers agree on: this snake of debris isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. “There will be some potential collision risk to most satellites in [low Earth orbit] from the fragmentation of Cosmos 1408 over the next few years to decades,” LeoLabs, a private space tracking company in the US sais.
A screengrab of a visualization, created by Hugh Lewis
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