Russia insists one of its reconnaissance satellites is fully operational and still circling the Earth, despite U.S. assertions it fell out of orbit and burned up in the skies over the U.S. mainland last week.

The Russian Defense Ministry denied on Tuesday a series of then-unconfirmed reports from the American Meteor Society that the Kosmos-2495 imaging reconnaissance satellite had, as its state news service stated, “exploded above the United States.”

“The Russian satellite group functions normally and is being constantly monitored by the Russian Aerospace Defense Forces,” said Russian Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the ministry, according to RIA Novosti.

Another spokesman on Friday denied what RIA Novosti called, “U.S. media rumors,” of the satellite’s fiery demise.

"These statements are yet another attempt to find out the location of the space object after the United States has lost track of it," said Russian Col. Alexei Zolotukhin, a spokesman for the Russian Aerospace Defense Forces, according to RIA Novosti.

The Russian rebukes stem from a string of eyewitness reports from Montana to New Mexico of a mysterious fiery object in the sky the night of Sept. 3, compiled by the American Meteor Society, a nonprofit organization that tracks such sightings. Science blog SpaceFlight101.com matched the sightings to local news reports of people who witnessed a bright object in the sky, and imaging that shows something re-entering the atmosphere.

The U.S. military units that oversee space operations confirm that the Russian satellite, also spelled Cosmos-2495, did indeed fail, drop out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. The Joint Functional Component Command for Space, or JFCC Space, and the Joint Space Operations Center, or JSpOC, can “assess with high confidence” that the rocket “re-entered the atmosphere and was removed from the U.S. satellite catalog as a decayed object” on Sept. 3, a spokesman said in an email.

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U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees these commands, tracks more than 17,000 objects in space from the JSpOC headquarters at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. A spokesman for the military attache office at the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., declined to comment on this discrepancy, referring all questions to the Russian Ministry of Defence website. Further requests for comment from the military office were unreturned.



The incident represents the realities of a plethora of objects in space, and the potential danger in the coming decades as more and more unregulated objects get pulled back toward Earth.

“As we keep launching satellites into low earth orbit, more of it is going to have to come down,” says John Crassidis, a professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Buffalo, and former NASA research fellow.

A satellite re-entering the atmosphere would look very much like a shooting star, he says. Public reports include a similar description of the Cosmos 2495 descent.

Crassidis references the zone within 99 miles and 1,200 miles above the Earth’s surface where most common satellites circle the planet. Each must travel at least 17,500 miles per hour to maintain the perpetual falling motion known as orbit. Air particles above the atmosphere produce some, albeit tiny, drag on each satellite, causing them to require occasional booster blasts to maintain speed.

The U.S. and Europe have regulations for the satellites they deploy, mandating each maintain at least enough fuel for a controlled re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere when it becomes useless or runs low on fuel to maintain itself. These satellites re-enter at a position where most will burn up in the atmosphere and residue will land in the ocean. Other space-venturing countries, such as Russia and China, do not have such regulations.

There is, however, nothing illegal about deploying reconnaissance and surveillance satellites, says Pamela Meredith, an American University professor in satellite communications and space law.



Policy discrepancies have created a problem in space, where, as Crassidis says, an object as small as a marble could take out something like the Hubble Space Telescope. Earthlings may be approaching the doomsday future outlined in the Kessler syndrome, named for NASA scientist Donald Kessler, who theorized increasing amount of space junk heightens chances of collisions, creating a possible chain reaction that could make space exploration too dangerous for generations.

For that reason, the Hubble operates at a much higher altitude above the planet. The International Space Station, however, and the shuttles that supply it, are within that low earth orbit zone. Astronauts aboard the station took to their Soyuz space capsule “life boats” in 2011, after reports and an unidentified object was bearing down on the station. The piece of space junk passed within 1,100 feet.

The problem is further exacerbated by actions such as the 2007 Chinese missile test designed to shoot down a weather satellite. It created more than 2,000 pieces of floating space debris as a result.

The United Nations has tried to create an international treaty for space safety through its Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Those efforts, so far, have been unsuccessful.

“The Russians obviously have not signed off on this treaty,” says Crassidis. “They basically said, ‘We can do what we want with our satellites.’”

Of course, Russia is not the only nation whose satellites’ flight paths caught international attention. A NASA space shuttle was delayed to launch and refurbish Sky Lab, a space station launched in 1973. As a result, it dropped out of orbit in 1979, burned up in the atmosphere with some residual pieces striking western Australia.

Despite this rise in concern, falling satellites poses no widespread danger yet, says Crassidis.