November 15, 2021 · about 480 km up · 4 years ago · counted by CelesTrak named debris group
5 fragments still on orbit
Russia destroyed a defunct Soviet-era signals-intelligence satellite in a missile test, forcing the crews of the ISS and the Chinese station into their escape capsules. Because it happened low, air drag has almost finished cleaning it up.
The event took place on November 15, 2021 at roughly 480 km. Russia destroyed a defunct Soviet-era signals-intelligence satellite in a missile test, forcing the crews of the ISS and the Chinese station into their escape capsules. Because it happened low, air drag has almost finished cleaning it up. What the catalogue has recorded since is 1,808 trackable fragments — pieces large enough for ground radar to find and follow, which in practice means roughly 10 cm and up. Everything smaller is up there too and is not counted by anyone, here or elsewhere; a fleck of paint at orbital speed carries about the energy of a rifle round, and no public catalogue can see it.
4 years later, 99.7% of it has already burned up and 5 pieces remain, between 312 and 575 km. The survivors are the fragments thrown upward by the breakup; everything left below them has already met enough air to come down.
Air drag is what cleans orbit, and there is almost none of it above about 600 km. Compare this cloud with Fengyun-1C, the furthest away in altitude of the four plotted here — a gap of 444 km. Cosmos 1408 sits at 388 km and is 99.7% gone; Fengyun-1C sits at 832 km and is 34.3% gone — and it happened in 2007, earlier. Lower is why this one is going away, and it is not close.
That is the whole argument of this layer, and it is the reason an anti-satellite test at 800 km is a fundamentally different act from the same test at 400 km. One is cleaned up by the atmosphere within a decade or two. The other is a hazard your grandchildren will be flying through.
This one cloud is 0.04% of every piece of debris currently tracked around Earth — 5 of 12,522. It ranks #4 of the 4 named clouds plotted on this layer. The named clouds are not the whole catalogue, and the hub says so plainly: most tracked debris traces back to launches with no famous name attached, including two rocket upper stages that each left behind more than this page’s smallest cloud.
Counts and altitudes for this cloud were derived from the CelesTrak SATCAT — the public satellite catalogue — read July 26, 2026. Live positions on the globe come from CelesTrak GP element sets, propagated in your browser. “On orbit” means no decay date on file; “burned up” means a decay date has been recorded. Fragments reenter continually, so these figures are a snapshot of one day rather than a running total. This cloud’s fragments are counted from CelesTrak’s own curated debris group for this event — the fragments CelesTrak attributes to it by name, which is the same list this map propagates. Other figures on this layer are counted by a different method, and the two do not produce identical totals — a launch can carry several satellites, so a fragment’s attributed parent is not always its launch. Neither is wrong; they answer slightly different questions. The catalogue-wide total was read live on July 26, 2026.