Russian scientific satellite CORONAS-F was launched on July, 31, 2001. The object was inserted in near-circular orbit with the inclination 82.5° and a mean altitude ～ 520 km. Due to the upper atmosphere drag CORONAS-F was permanently descended and as a result on December, 6, 2005 it has finished the earth-orbital flight, having lifetime in space ～ 4.5 years. The satellite structural features and its flight attitude control led to the significant variations of its ballistic coefficient during the flight. It was a cause of some specific difficulties in the fulfillment of the ballistic and navigation support of this space vehicle flight. Besides the main mission objective CORONAS-F also has been selected by the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) as a target object for the next regular international re-entry test campaign on a program of surveillance and re-entry prediction for the hazard space objects within their de-orbiting phases. Spacecraft (S/C) CORONAS-F kept its working state right up to the end of the flight - down to the atmosphere entry. This fact enabled to realization of the additional research experiments, concerning with an estimation of the atmospheric density within the low earth orbits (LEO) of the artificial satellites, and made possible to continue track the S/C during final phase of its flight by means of Russian regular command & tracking system, used for it control.
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