Fengyun-lC Debris Cloud Evolution Over One Decade

摘要

It has been over a decade since the People's Republic of China conducted an anti-satellite test destroying its Fengyun-1C weather satellite in a sun-synchronous orbit. This test generated over two thousand trackable debris objects and thousands more, smaller and untrackable objects in the most valuable and populated low-earth orbital regime posing an extreme collision hazard to current and future spacecraft for many decades to come. The continuing evolution of this debris cloud is analyzed both en masse and through examination of selected individual objects using historical element set data from the Space Track Catalog.