Russian defunct military satellite breaks up in graveyard orbit
A Russian defunct military geosynchronous satellite that was launched in 2014 and spent a decade spying on other geosynchronous satellites only to be moved to a graveyard orbit in 2025 when its fuel ran out apparently broke apart earlier today.
The Swiss company S2A systems, which specializes in tracking orbital objects, captured the moment the spacecraft began disintegrating. I have embedded that footage below, though it really is far less exciting than it sounds.
The debris poses a very small risk to other geosynchronous satellites, which orbit at about 22,000 miles elevation where there is too little atmosphere to decay orbits. The graveyard orbit is several hundred miles higher.
A short time lapse of the fragmentation event on LUCH (OLYMP) #40258 that took place today, 2026-01-30 from 06:09:03.486 UTC. pic.twitter.com/0bwbNvlnCL
— s2a systems (@s2a_systems) January 30, 2026
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
A Russian defunct military geosynchronous satellite that was launched in 2014 and spent a decade spying on other geosynchronous satellites only to be moved to a graveyard orbit in 2025 when its fuel ran out apparently broke apart earlier today.
The Swiss company S2A systems, which specializes in tracking orbital objects, captured the moment the spacecraft began disintegrating. I have embedded that footage below, though it really is far less exciting than it sounds.
The debris poses a very small risk to other geosynchronous satellites, which orbit at about 22,000 miles elevation where there is too little atmosphere to decay orbits. The graveyard orbit is several hundred miles higher.
A short time lapse of the fragmentation event on LUCH (OLYMP) #40258 that took place today, 2026-01-30 from 06:09:03.486 UTC. pic.twitter.com/0bwbNvlnCL
— s2a systems (@s2a_systems) January 30, 2026
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I wouldn’t say exciting but it is interesting to see. Thank you.
Lucky coincidence that they happened to be watching at the moment of breakup.
Where I come from, we make our own luck and there’s no such thing as a coincidence.
John: S2A specializes in tracking objects in orbit, so it wasn’t luck they saw this happen. It is what the company does.
What would cause the satellite to break up like that?
Chuck,
These are just my opinions based on the S2A observation. Something probably punctured the xenon propellant tank(s). You see the first explosion and three pixels moving away from it. Looking at Anatoly’s picture of the satellite as a reference, those three pixels moving away are possibly the antenna array and the two solar arrays.
Looking at the film at one minute and twenty seconds, it looks like another tank was ruptured.
Is this “Graveyard” an elevation where geosync satellites, and junk, are sent, go, to be “buried” ?
Alex Andrite: Yes. Routinely geo satellites are moved up into this orbit when they are decommissioned, since at this orbit height their orbits won’t decay.
Chuck asked: “What would cause the satellite to break up like that?”
If they didn’t let the propellant tanks vent, then one may have burst. That could have caused similar failures on other tanks.
The batteries used on geostationary spacecraft often are pressurized and must be very carefully managed. If they are mismanaged, one or more cells can burst and cause further damage in other nearby cells. The batteries must also be carefully prepared for decommissioning or abandoning a satellite.
Edward: Are you suggesting the Russians didn’t properly prepare this satellite for decommissioning? That they might have mismanaged its shutdown? How dare you!?
Sarcasm noted. However:
These things happen.
Orbital Sciences, back in the 1990s, was delayed in its launch license because they had not added these kinds of preparations for their upper stage to make sure it didn’t burst in orbit after its job was done. It has been decades learning how to do it better. I would have said doing it “right,” but we are still learning.
On the other hand, some countries may be faster than others at applying lessons learned.
(Huh. Look at that. I answered the “how dare you” question without intending to.)
That was a much more protracted process than I figured it would be. It puts one in mind of nothing so much as those now-ubiquitous cell phone videos of Ukrainian drones hitting Russian ordnance storage depots – an initial explosion, then additional secondary explosions, sometimes for hours or days. Not enough explosive stuff on a satellite, even a big one, to keep generating secondaries for more than a couple of minutes, but a fascinating disintegration just the same.
It does, though, underscore the importance of doing advance planning for removing all Russian presence from orbit once that nation is in its richly-deserved grave. There is a godawful amount of junk up there covered in Cyrillic characters. The long-term peaceful spacefaring nations will have quite a job on their hands purging space of orphaned orbital detritus after the two current major bad-actor nations have been seen off and interred.