2021 Russian satellite intercept

This video shows a physics-based recreation of the shooting down of Russian Satellite Cosmos 1408 by an object launched from the earth’s surface near Plesetsk, Russia. The illustration uses notional, publicly available data to recreate the event. In the video, the orbit of COSMOS 1408 is illustrated by a green line, while the anti-satellite object is illustrated by a white line labeled “ASAT“. After impact, the hypothetical debris field is depicted in red, showing the intersection with the orbit of the International Space Station (labeled ISS), based on hypothetical, but realistic parameters. This illustration was generated using AGI, an Ansys company’s Systems Tool Kit (STK) software suite, which is widely used in the space aerospace and defense community to accurately simulate complex multi-domain missions.