TITAN 4B CENTAUR R/B

TITAN 4B CENTAUR R/B is a spent rocket body associated with United States, launched on 1999-04-30 from Cape Canaveral, Florida on the Milstar DFS-3 launch. With over 27 years in orbit, it has far exceeded many satellites’ design lifetimes. It orbits in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) at altitudes between 707 km and 5,144 km with an inclination of 28.3°. It travels at approximately 23,573 km/h (6.55 km/s), completing one full orbit every 2 hours 29 minutes — that’s roughly 9.67 orbits per day. Its orbital eccentricity of 0.2386 gives it a noticeably elliptical path, with significant altitude variation between perigee and apogee. Spent rocket bodies like TITAN 4B CENTAUR R/B are among the largest pieces of uncontrolled space debris and are priority targets for collision avoidance manoeuvres and future active debris removal efforts.

TITAN 4B CENTAUR R/B orbits at an average altitude of 2,926 km in Medium Earth Orbit, the region between LEO and GEO (2,000–35,786 km). MEO’s higher altitude gives each satellite a much larger ground footprint than LEO, meaning fewer spacecraft are needed for global coverage — but signal latency is higher and radiation from the Van Allen belts is a significant design constraint. Within ±50 km of TITAN 4B CENTAUR R/B’s average altitude, there are currently 0 active payloads and 4 tracked debris or rocket body fragments. This is a relatively sparse altitude band, containing less than 1% of all active satellites. With an inclination of 28.3°, TITAN 4B CENTAUR R/B passes over latitudes between 28.3°N and 28.3°S, covering the tropical and temperate zones where most of the world’s population resides. Low-to-mid inclination orbits are efficient to reach from equatorial and mid-latitude launch sites. United States operates approximately 12,413 active satellites in total.