Updated 12:48 p.m. Moscow Time
MOSCOW, September 12 (RIA Novosti) – The Russian Aerospace Defense Forces again dismissed US media rumors of a Russian military satellite allegedly exploding above the United States.
"These statements are yet another attempt to find out the location of the space object after the United States has lost track of it," Aerospace Defense Forces spokesman Col. Alexei Zolotukhin said.
He reiterated that all Russian spacecraft function in normal regime and ground control services have steady control over them. No malfunctions have been reported in the past days, according to the spokesman.
No malfunctions have been reported in the past days, the spokesman said.
A spokesman for the US Strategic Command told RIA Novosti earlier in the day that the Russian reconnaissance satellite re-entered the atmosphere and crashed last week.
On September 3, the American Meteor Society revealed more than 30 reports from alleged eyewitnesses who said they had seen a big fireball streaking across the sky. Website spaceflight101.com, dedicated to covering spaceflight events, assumed the fireball could have been Kosmos-2495 falling apart in the air.
Kosmos-2495, a member of the Yantar Russian satellite series, was launched on May 6, 2014, designed to operate on a low Earth orbit.
