Monday, 9 June 2025

The reentry of the Chinese Zhuque-2E upper stage 2025-103G over Kazachstan on 5 June 2025

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still from one of the fireball movies posted on Twitter by  @Buggy__Bugler   In the evening of 5 June 2025 around 22h local time (17h UTC)...
Wednesday, 28 May 2025

Raiders of the Lost Venus Probe: a post-mortem of an interesting reentry and the confusion it left

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On 10 May 2025, an unusual object, the Kosmos 482 Descent Craft , had an uncontrolled reentry (see this earlier post ). With my TU Delft col...
Friday, 23 May 2025

Kosmos 2588 has been placed in the same orbital plane as the US spy satellite USA 338: another RPO?

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click image to enlarge   Russia launched a new military satellite from Plesetsk today (23 May 2025), Kosmos 2588 (cat nr. 64095, COSPAR 20...

The tumbling behaviour of the mysterious Kosmos 2553 satellite

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Framestack (530 frames) showing variable brightness of Kosmos 2553. Click image to enlarge Over three years ago, on 5 February 2022, Russia ...
Thursday, 24 April 2025

Kosmos 482 Descent Craft reentry forecasts [PERIODICALLY UPDATED]

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Click diagram to enlarge Last update: 11 May 2025 10:15 UTC    (this post is being periodically updated with new reentry forecasts/postcast...
Friday, 4 April 2025

Observing FRAM-2, a commercial crewed Dragon mission in Polar orbit

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Click image to enlarge The image above is a stack of twelve 4-second exposures taken with a Canon EOS 80D and EF 2.8/24 mm lens, and shows t...
Thursday, 27 March 2025

USA 498, the NROL-69 payload, found

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click map to enlarge On 24 March 2025 at 17:48 UTC , a Falcon 9 blasted off from Cape Canaveral launch pad 40 in Florida as NROL-69 , carryi...
Friday, 14 March 2025

The Russian eavesdropping satellite LUCH (OLYMP-K) 2 has moved significantly

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click diagram to enlarge I have written before on this blog about the Russian military SIGINT satellite LUCH (OLYMP-K) 2 (2023-031A). It ...
Wednesday, 19 February 2025

The reentry of a Falcon 9 upper stage over NW Europe on 19 February [UPDATED]

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In the early morning of February 19, 2025, near 3:45 UTC (4:45 CET) scores of people in the Netherlands, UK, Germany and Denmark saw a slow...