Survey of past on-orbit fragmentation events

Abstract

Following the first on-orbit fragmentation, the explosion of the Transit 4A rocket body on June 29, 1961, 165 breakups were recorded up until August 31, 2001. So far, only three collisional breakups have been reasonably confirmed, while the remaining 162 fragmentations resulted from explosions. The aim of this paper is to assess the contribution of these on-orbit fragmentation events to the catalogued and undetected orbital debris population. To do this, the largest pieces of fragmentation debris were extracted by the US Space Command catalog of August 31, 2001, and subsequently assembled for families or single events, then counted and graphically represented. The contribution to the undetected debris population was investigated using CLDSIM, a dedicated software system, in order to simulate and propagate the debris clouds produced by each fragmentation event. The characteristics and properties of the fragmentation debris population, obtained by merging the catalogued and undetected particles, were then analyzed.