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Nuclear Satellite Accidents:
There have been at least 41 known Soviet and now Russian missions involving nuclear power. At least six have failed. To date, three of 26 US nuclear space missions have failed - a failure rate of 12 percent.
- 1964: A US satellite powered by 2.1 pounds of plutonium in a SNAP 9A reactor burned up over the West Indian Ocean, leaving a swath of plutonium-238 in the stratosphere. By November 1970, only about 5 percent of the original Plutonium-238 remained in the atmosphere and a US soil sampling showed SNAP-9A debris was present "at all continents and at all latitudes."
- 1968: A NIMBUS-B-1 weather satellite was destroyed after its launch vehicle malfunctioned. The plutonium fuel cells from the spacecraft's two RTGs were recovered, intact, from the bottom of the Santa Barbara Channel, near the California coast.
- 1969: Kosmos 300 and Kosmos 305 burned up in the atmosphere. It contained 31.1 kilograms of radioactive fuel, and fell back to Earth. The on-board fuel broke open on reentry and landed in the Pacific Ocean, just North of Japan.
- 1970: The Apollo 13 mission was aborted, and the spacecraft returned to Earth. The RTG was attached to the lunar module, which broke up on reentry. The RTG heat source reentered the Earth atmosphere intact, with no release of plutonium, and currently is located deep in the Tonga trench in the Pacific Ocean.
- 1973: A Soviet RORSAT satellite came down in flames north of Japan, trailing radiation. It contained 31.1 kilograms of radioactive fuel, and fell back to Earth. The on-board fuel broke open on reentry and landed in the Pacific Ocean, just North of Japan.
- 1975: NASA launched Viking 1, which was to survey Mars. The vehicle broke up in orbit. Currently only 190 parts remain in orbit and are being tracked. It is not known if the radioactive fuel is still in orbit or has already be deposited on the surface of the Earth.
- 1978: The Kosmos 954 fell from the sky, scattering 110 pounds of highly-enriched uranium fuel over a 600-km (373-mile) path across Canada's Northwest Territories.
- 1982 : The Kosmos 1402 failed. When safety systems failed to boost the satellite's reactor core into a higher "safe" orbit, the craft plummeted into the South Atlantic, releasing 68 pounds of uranium-238 over the South Atlantic Ocean.
- 1983: USSR's RORSAT Kosmos 1172 exploded in orbit, breaking into 158 pieces. All but 3 pieces fell to Earth. It is not known whether the 30 kilograms of radioactive material are still in orbit, or have already been scattered in Earth's atmosphere.
- 1987: USSR's RORSAT Kosmos 1900 failed to reach its orbit and was pushed into an elliptical orbit to keep it in "storage." It is now predicted to reenter the Earth's atmosphere, with its payload of 30 kilograms of radioactive material, in a few hundred years.
- 1996, Chilean Navy Commander-in-Chief Jorge Martinez Busch ordered a Navy ship to look for traces of plutonium in an area southeast of Easter Island (Pacific Ocean west of Chili) where a Russian satellite fell to earth in Chilean territorial waters on November 17. 200 grams of plutonium 238 was contained in the Mars 96's batteries.
"The news is bad," says Barrera. an astrophysicist at the Astronomy Institute at Chile's Universidad Catolica del Norte, "I think it vaporized."
The MARS-96 spacecraft was built using the PHOBOS type spacecraft. Russia's last Mars mission failed when Phobos-1 and Phobos-2, launched a few days apart in July 1988, vanished without a trace.
Even the "successful" orbits of many of these satellites will ultimately decay, and eventually plummet to Earth. The Soviet "Kosmos" satellites currently in "stable" orbits will reenter our atmosphere in just short of 300 years. Information about all of the poisonous material in these declining orbits is still classified, but some estimates place the amount of radioactive fuel (plutonium and enriched uranium) "up there" at well over a metric ton!
There have been at least 41 known Soviet and now Russian missions involving nuclear power. At least six have failed. To date, three of 26 US nuclear space missions have failed - a failure rate of 12 percent.
- 1964: A US satellite powered by 2.1 pounds of plutonium in a SNAP 9A reactor burned up over the West Indian Ocean, leaving a swath of plutonium-238 in the stratosphere. By November 1970, only about 5 percent of the original Plutonium-238 remained in the atmosphere and a US soil sampling showed SNAP-9A debris was present "at all continents and at all latitudes."
- 1968: A NIMBUS-B-1 weather satellite was destroyed after its launch vehicle malfunctioned. The plutonium fuel cells from the spacecraft's two RTGs were recovered, intact, from the bottom of the Santa Barbara Channel, near the California coast.
- 1969: Kosmos 300 and Kosmos 305 burned up in the atmosphere. It contained 31.1 kilograms of radioactive fuel, and fell back to Earth. The on-board fuel broke open on reentry and landed in the Pacific Ocean, just North of Japan.
- 1970: The Apollo 13 mission was aborted, and the spacecraft returned to Earth. The RTG was attached to the lunar module, which broke up on reentry. The RTG heat source reentered the Earth atmosphere intact, with no release of plutonium, and currently is located deep in the Tonga trench in the Pacific Ocean.
- 1973: A Soviet RORSAT satellite came down in flames north of Japan, trailing radiation. It contained 31.1 kilograms of radioactive fuel, and fell back to Earth. The on-board fuel broke open on reentry and landed in the Pacific Ocean, just North of Japan.
- 1975: NASA launched Viking 1, which was to survey Mars. The vehicle broke up in orbit. Currently only 190 parts remain in orbit and are being tracked. It is not known if the radioactive fuel is still in orbit or has already be deposited on the surface of the Earth.
- 1978: The Kosmos 954 fell from the sky, scattering 110 pounds of highly-enriched uranium fuel over a 600-km (373-mile) path across Canada's Northwest Territories.
- 1982 : The Kosmos 1402 failed. When safety systems failed to boost the satellite's reactor core into a higher "safe" orbit, the craft plummeted into the South Atlantic, releasing 68 pounds of uranium-238 over the South Atlantic Ocean.
- 1983: USSR's RORSAT Kosmos 1172 exploded in orbit, breaking into 158 pieces. All but 3 pieces fell to Earth. It is not known whether the 30 kilograms of radioactive material are still in orbit, or have already been scattered in Earth's atmosphere.
- 1987: USSR's RORSAT Kosmos 1900 failed to reach its orbit and was pushed into an elliptical orbit to keep it in "storage." It is now predicted to reenter the Earth's atmosphere, with its payload of 30 kilograms of radioactive material, in a few hundred years.
- 1996, Chilean Navy Commander-in-Chief Jorge Martinez Busch ordered a Navy ship to look for traces of plutonium in an area southeast of Easter Island (Pacific Ocean west of Chili) where a Russian satellite fell to earth in Chilean territorial waters on November 17. 200 grams of plutonium 238 was contained in the Mars 96's batteries.
"The news is bad," says Barrera. an astrophysicist at the Astronomy Institute at Chile's Universidad Catolica del Norte, "I think it vaporized."
The MARS-96 spacecraft was built using the PHOBOS type spacecraft. Russia's last Mars mission failed when Phobos-1 and Phobos-2, launched a few days apart in July 1988, vanished without a trace.
Even the "successful" orbits of many of these satellites will ultimately decay, and eventually plummet to Earth. The Soviet "Kosmos" satellites currently in "stable" orbits will reenter our atmosphere in just short of 300 years. Information about all of the poisonous material in these declining orbits is still classified, but some estimates place the amount of radioactive fuel (plutonium and enriched uranium) "up there" at well over a metric ton!