Having been fully retired in June 2014 after suffering from an unspecified anomaly, the former weather satellite NOAA 16 which had previously been part of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fleet has now broken up in orbit. The Joint Space Operations Centre announced that “objects” from the spacecraft break up were being tracked from 25 November onwards with the first detection of the event having taken place at 0816 GMT. The spacecraft was originally launched in 2000 and achieved its minimum two year design life as well as its expected life of five years when it became a back-up to other NOAA spacecraft.
