juliensimon/orbital-fragmentation-events

Orbital Fragmentation Events

Part of the Orbital Mechanics Datasets collection on Hugging Face.

Catalog of 1,073 orbital fragmentation events derived from the NORAD Satellite Catalog (SATCAT) via CelesTrak. A fragmentation event is identified as any launch that produced 4 or more cataloged debris objects, indicating an in-orbit breakup caused by explosions, collisions, anomalous events, or deliberate destruction.

Dataset description

Every significant breakup event in Earth orbit since 1960 is captured in this dataset. When a satellite or rocket body fragments -- whether from a propulsion failure, accidental collision, deliberate destruction (e.g., anti-satellite tests), or unexplained anomaly -- it produces tracked debris objects cataloged by the 18th Space Defense Squadron. This dataset aggregates those debris back to their parent launch, identifying the primary spacecraft or rocket body involved and computing debris statistics. It is inspired by the methodology used in NASA's "History of On-Orbit Satellite Fragmentations" technical report series published by the Orbital Debris Program Office.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
parent_object_id	string	International designator of parent object (COSPAR ID)
parent_norad_id	int32	NORAD catalog number of the parent object
parent_name	string	Name of the parent spacecraft or rocket body
parent_object_type	string	PAY (payload), R/B (rocket body), DEB (debris)
country_code	string	Owner/operator country or organization code
launch_date	datetime	Date of the original launch (UTC)
launch_year	int32	Year of launch (for grouping/filtering)
launch_site	string	Launch site code
debris_cataloged	int32	Total number of cataloged debris pieces from this event
debris_on_orbit	int32	Number of debris pieces still in orbit
debris_decayed	int32	Number of debris pieces that have reentered
decay_pct	float	Percentage of debris that has decayed
apogee_km	float	Apogee altitude of parent object orbit (km)
perigee_km	float	Perigee altitude of parent object orbit (km)
altitude_km	float	Mean orbital altitude (km)
inclination_deg	float	Orbital inclination (degrees)
period_min	float	Orbital period (minutes)
orbit_type	string	LEO, MEO, GEO, or HEO

Quick stats

• 1,073 fragmentation events spanning 1960 to 2026
• 32,567 total cataloged debris, 11,920 still on orbit
• Orbit distribution: LEO (947), MEO (65), GEO (47), unknown (8), HEO (6)
• Top countries: CIS (618), US (267), PRC (99), JPN (22), FR (13)

Most prolific breakup events

Parent Object	Country	Debris Cataloged	On Orbit	Altitude (km)
FENGYUN 1C	PRC	3,534	2,343	803
COSMOS 1408	CIS	1,806	5	146
COSMOS 2251	CIS	1,716	639	781
YUNHAI-3 01	PRC	793	631	848
STEP 2	US	753	58	597

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/orbital-fragmentation-events", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# Most prolific breakups
df.nlargest(10, "debris_cataloged")[["parent_name", "debris_cataloged", "debris_on_orbit"]]

# Events still polluting orbit (>90% debris remaining)
active_pollution = df[df["decay_pct"] < 10].sort_values("debris_on_orbit", ascending=False)

# Breakups by orbit type
df.groupby("orbit_type")["debris_cataloged"].sum()

# Events by decade
df["decade"] = (df["launch_year"] // 10) * 10
df.groupby("decade")["parent_norad_id"].count()

# Country breakdown
df.groupby("country_code")["debris_cataloged"].agg(["count", "sum"]).sort_values("sum", ascending=False).head(10)

Data source

Derived from the CelesTrak SATCAT, which mirrors the official US Space Command catalog maintained by the 18th Space Defense Squadron. Fragmentation events are identified by grouping cataloged debris objects by their international designator prefix (launch ID) and filtering for launches with 4+ debris pieces.

For authoritative event-by-event analysis including assessed causes, see NASA's History of On-Orbit Satellite Fragmentations report series.

Related datasets

• reentry-events -- Atmospheric reentry catalog
• space-track-satcat -- Full NORAD satellite catalog
• active-satellites -- Currently operational spacecraft

Pipeline

Source code: juliensimon/space-datasets

Citation

@dataset{fragmentation_events,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {Orbital Fragmentation Events},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/orbital-fragmentation-events},
  note = {Derived from NORAD SATCAT via CelesTrak (Dr. T.S. Kelso)}
}

License

CelesTrak Usage Policy