Home › Breakup events › Cosmos 2251 (2009 collision)
On-orbit collision · 2009-02-10
The dead Russian Cosmos 2251 satellite was the larger contributor to the 2009 Iridium-Cosmos collision, shedding roughly 1,600 tracked fragments. Together the two clouds sharply raised the collision risk for everything in low Earth orbit and remain a standard example of the Kessler-syndrome cascade hazard.
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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 2251 (2009 collision) 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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