Home › Breakup events › Cosmos 1275 (1981 breakup)
ANOMALOUS · 1981-07-24
The Soviet navigation satellite Cosmos 1275 disintegrated weeks after its June 1981 launch at ~950 km, one of the earliest major unexplained on-orbit breakups. With no propellant aboard, a battery explosion or a collision with existing debris are the leading suspected causes; its fragments still populate low Earth orbit.
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Isolate this debris field on the live globe →Opens Space Junk View, hides everything else, and frames the surviving tracked fragments of Cosmos 1275 (1981 breakup) as they orbit.
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