Kosmos 482, a Soviet descent module built to survive Venus’s atmosphere, is expected to reenter Earth’s atmosphere between May 8 and 11, 2025, with a high probability of debris survival due to its robust design.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage made an uncontrolled re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere over Europe on February 19, 2025, creating a bright display across the night sky before debris impacted multiple locations in Poland.
A Starlink satellite reentry created a bright fireball-like spectacle across the Midwest skies at 03:00 UTC on January 29, 2025 (21:00 local time on January 28), with debris visible across multiple states and many observers initially mistaking it for a meteor.
A large piece of space debris measuring 2.5 m (8.2 feet) and weighing 500 kg (1 102 pounds) fell in Mukuku Village, Makueni County, Kenya, on December 30, 2024. Such incidents are rare, with only a few large debris objects surviving reentry each year and an even smaller number impacting populated areas.
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.
An unexpected atmospheric re-entry of the Starlink 2382 satellite at 19:29 UTC on August 27, 2024, created a stunning fireball over France, Switzerland, and northern Italy.
Russian decommissioned satellite Resurs-P1 broke up in orbit on June 26, 2024, releasing roughly 100 pieces of trackable debris. The number rose to 180 by the end of June 27 and is expected to keep rising, according to Leo Labs. Following the breakup, NASA instructed the 9 astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to take shelter in their respective spacecraft as a standard precautionary measure.
In March 2021, NASA ground controllers deployed the International Space Station’s (ISS) robotic arm to discard a cargo pallet (EP-9) containing obsolete nickel hydride batteries, following upgrades to lithium-ion units. This operation set a record for the heaviest item jettisoned from the ISS. While the entire pallet was expected to disintegrate before reaching Earth’s surface, a fragment of this hardware survived atmospheric re-entry and struck a residence in Naples, Florida, in March 2024.
The International Space Station’s (ISS) largest-ever discarded object, a hefty equipment pallet weighing 2.9 tons, is anticipated to make an uncontrolled descent back to Earth between March 8 and 9, 2024. Launched into space for a critical ISS power system upgrade, this pallet, loaded with nine old station batteries, will not fully disintegrate upon reentry, with predictions indicating about half a ton of debris could survive the descent and impact the planet’s surface.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Earth observation satellite, ERS-2, is scheduled for atmospheric reentry on February 21, 2024. Launched in April 1995, ERS-2 has been instrumental in monitoring Earth’s surface and natural disasters for nearly 30 years.
