MILAN. A cloud of debris in orbit, with at least 85 traceable fragments, was generated by the breakup of a mysterious Russian satellite, Kosmos 2499: the event dates back to January 4 and was announced more than a month later by the 18th Defense Squadron spacecraft, which monitors man-made objects in orbit. American experts are evaluating the debris floating 1,169 kilometers from the Earth, but have not yet put forward hypotheses on the possible causes of the breakup: this is the second that the satellite has encountered after the one that took place on October 23, 2021 (as Jonathan recalls on Twitter McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics). The breakup is only the last of the mysteries that have marked the life of the Russian satellite, as the space.com website also points out.
Kosmos 2499 was launched in May 2014 together with three Rodnik military communications satellites, although its name did not appear officially on the launch manifest. The American satellite tracking systems had seen it carry out maneuvers, and in 2014 it was therefore reclassified as a ‘payload’, called Kosmos 2499. Its movements had led to the hypothesis that the Russians were experimenting with a technology to allow space vehicles to track and possibly even disable other satellites, but Russia’s Roscosmos space agency had argued that it was a technology developed in cooperation with the Russian Academy of Sciences for peaceful purposes, including research.
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