CZ-6A Rocket Body breakup

The 18th Space Defence Squadron tweeted on November 13th that a breakup associated with a recent launch of a Chinese satellite had occurred on the early morning hours of November 12th. This breakup was associated with the upper stage rocket body CZ-6A R/B with NORAD ID #54236 and COSPAR ID 2022-151. We scheduled a 4 hour beam park observation using the 930 MHz EISCAT UHF radar to characterize the debris cloud size, adding another valuable measurement to the unique catalogue debris clouds produced by fragmentation events. It appears that this recent event is not as bad as the anti-satellite events, or the Iridium-Cosmos collision. But we did observe a small cluster of new objects appearing on the orbital ring of the parent object.

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