Atlas 5 Centaur Rocket Body breaks up in orbit into a debris cloud of 40 plus objects

The body of the Atlas 5 Centaur rocket that delivered the GOES 17 satellite in 2018 broke up in a highly elliptical orbit on September 6, 2024, at around 05:21 UTC. The breakup was observed by Slingshot Aerospace at around 05:32 UTC from an observation site in Chile. They detected a debris cloud of more than 40 objects related to the fragmentation of the rocket, which currently doesn’t appear to pose threat to any active spacecraft.

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