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COSMOS 2251 DEB

NORAD 35465· COSPAR 1993-036ALK· Debris· LEO
Parent launch
The parent object was launched on Jun 16, 1993 from 132/1 (132L), Russia aboard a Kosmos-3M (11K65M).
Kosmos-3M | Strela-2M 51 →
GLONASS satellite (representative)
Representative GLONASS image · Patrick G. · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Live · TLE epoch 2026-09-06 11:18 UTC
Orbit class
LEO — Low Earth Orbit (circular, < 2,000 km)
Operator
Russia / Soviet Union (military)
Country
Russia
Manufacturer
—
Launched
Jun 16, 1993
Mass
—
Apogee
792 km
Perigee
702 km
Inclination
74.00°
Period
1.66 h
Debris origin · satellite collision

Kosmos-2251 was a defunct Russian Strela-2M military communications satellite, inactive since the mid-1990s. On 10 February 2009 it collided with the active US Iridium 33 satellite at about 789 km over northern Siberia — the first accidental hypervelocity collision between two intact satellites. The Kosmos-2251 cloud is the larger of the two, with roughly 1,600 catalogued fragments.

Parent object
Kosmos-2251
Event date
Feb 10, 2009
Altitude
~789 km
Radar size class
SMALL
2009 satellite collision (Wikipedia) →
Part of the GLONASS constellation · this satellite is one of 758

Russian satellite navigation system. ~24 active sats in MEO at ~19,100 km.

See all GLONASS satellites →

Altitude history

Apogee and perigee for COSMOS 2251 DEB across 103 days of archived orbital elements (105 element sets, one per day).

Trend
Stable
Change
-0.6 km
Rate
-0.01 km/day
Now
702 × 792 km
747794701May 28Sep 9
Apogee Perigee

Derived from our own archive of CelesTrak orbital elements, sampled every 3 hours. Short windows show drag and station-keeping; they are not a reentry prediction.

From the same launch

60 other catalogued objects still in orbit from launch 1993-036 (Kosmos-3M | Strela-2M 51).

…and 36 more from this launch.

Sources & further reading

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