[Subjectivist]

A US military satellite exploded after detecting an unexplained “sudden spike in temperature”, sending dozens of chunks of debris tumbling into different orbits around Earth.
Civilian company CelesTrak was first to notice the explosion of the once-secret weather satellite and the US Air Force subsequently confirmed that it had been lost.
The satellite was an ageing component of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program which the US military began developing the in the 1960s to help plan reconnaissance and surveillance missions.
In 1972 the system was declassified, and data made available to civilian scientists.
The lost satellite was the 13th to be launched as part of DMSP, designated DMSP-F13, and had been in Earth orbit since 1995.

More at the link,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/n ... Earth.html

[vox_mundi]

Have the Chinese been practicing with their new particle beam? They say it went pop over Antarctica.

[KaiserJeep]

I know who shot it:

[vox_mundi]

Wrong planet kj...

It was the aliens from the X Files movie. It all adds up. Secret Antarctic base. Alien spaceship. Cigarette Smoking Man. The logic is irrefutable.

[GregT]

What goes up. Must come down. They say that there are around 4000 or so satellites in Earth's orbit. Every single last one of them will eventually return back to where they came from.

[Subjectivist]

What goes up. Must come down. They say that there are around 4000 or so satellites in Earth's orbit. Every single last one of them will eventually return back to where they came from.

Sure in the sense that 'eventually' covers time out for thousands of years. The orbital life expectancy of an object in geosynchronous orbit is very, very long because drag is very low at those high altitudes. Pretty much anything in less than a 300km orbit will fall out within a decade and most things higher will stay up for a century or more. For things really high up the drag of the moons gravity each orbit is the largest factor, and that is a tiny factor, but over a thousand years all those tiny factors add up.

Read this for lots of details,
http://fas.org/spp/military/docops/army ... hap5im.htm

[dissident]

It must have been a collision since there is no fuel source on board this satellite to cause an explosion of this scale.

Surprising this does not happen more often considering all the junk in orbit. This junk is experiencing drag from ionized atmospheric gases and both electron and proton fluxes in the Van Allen belts and slowly spiraling towards the Earth.

[Surf]

in 2009 whe Iridium 33 and Kosmos-2251. iridium 33 was an operational communications sattelite for iridium sattelite phone system. Kosmos -2251 was a russsian sattelite that was not operational. both were in polar orbit and collided over the north pole.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision

All the debries from those two sattelites converges over the north and south poles. This greatly increases the odes of a collision over the poles. It appears this recent collision was over the south pole.

[vox_mundi]

... a scenario occurred in 2007. Like the Russians in the movie, the Chinese fired a missile at one of their satellites, a Fengyun weather satellite. On January 11, a kinetic kill vehicle was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. The FY-1C Polar Orbit Satellite was struck at an altitude of 537 miles, resulting in the largest cloud of space debris yet known, consisting of 2,317 pieces of trackable objects and an estimated 150,000 smaller particles. On January 22, 2013, the Russian BLITS laser-ranging satellite was struck by a piece of debris suspected to be from the Chinese anti-satellite missile test. Although BLITS was not destroyed, its orbit and spin rate were changed.

On February 9, 2009, two Russian satellites, the deactivated Kosmos 2251, and Iridium 33, an operational satellite, collided over northern Siberia at a relative velocity of 7.3 miles per second, creating a cloud of debris that has not yet been measured accurately.


The debris field of the destroyed Fengyun 1C satellite can be seen in this image in red. The white orbit is that of the International Space Station. China was first to destroy a satellite on orbit and the first nation to protest when the U.S. destroyed the USA-193 satellite in February of 2008. Image Credit: NASA

http://www.spaceflightinsider.com/space ... al-debris/

[dashster]

It must have also had a classified payload. I don't see a need for a "weather satellite" to be classified.