Home › Breakup events › NOAA 17 (2021 breakup)
FRAGMENTATION · 2021-03-10
Sister craft to NOAA 16, the decommissioned NOAA 17 fragmented in March 2021 at ~810 km, again attributed to a battery failure. The breakup added dozens of tracked pieces to an already debris-rich sun-synchronous regime.
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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 NOAA 17 (2021 breakup) 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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