Old Russian Nuclear Satellite Leaking

Just what we need, more debris in space. [Link]

Spinning around the Earth for more than two decades, an old Soviet satellite, replete with a nuclear reactor, has acted up.

Launched by the former Soviet Union in February 1987, Cosmos 1818 was the first of two vehicles designed to evaluate an advanced nuclear power supply in low Earth orbit.

But ground-watching surveillance gear has picked up dozens of small particles spewing into space from the 21-year-old satellite. Why the unexpected debris cloud? It's still what industry types call an unexplained debris generation event.

Information on the event, first spotted in July 2008, has been highlighted in the January issue of the Orbital Debris Quarterly News – produced by the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office at the space agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.