Home › Breakup events › Cosmos 1408 (Russian ASAT)
Anti-satellite test · 2021-11-15
On 15 Nov 2021 Russia destroyed its defunct Cosmos 1408 satellite with a direct-ascent anti-satellite missile, generating over 1,500 trackable fragments in low Earth orbit. The debris forced ISS crew to shelter in their return spacecraft and drew worldwide condemnation. Most fragments have since re-entered, but the event remains a textbook case of the danger of kinetic ASAT tests.
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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 1408 (Russian ASAT) as they orbit.
Breakup events like this are why low Earth orbit is now crowded with debris. Space Junk View tracks all 31,328 cataloged objects — including roughly 10,229 pieces of debris — and lets you isolate a single event's fragment cloud to see exactly where its wreckage went. See the full breakup-events hub and our space-debris statistics.
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