A 20-year-old US military satellite, dubbed Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 13 (DMSP-F13), has exploded in space, following a "sudden spike in temperature." According to the US Air Force Space Command, the "catastrophic event" produced about 50 pieces of space debris around the satellite's last known location.

Senior research astrodynamicist, T.S. Keslo, was the first to spot the incident and believes that the explosion took place around February 3, which the US Air Force later confirmed to be true. The possibility of any collision with space junk or other external factors causing the explosion has been ruled out. Investigators have attributed the explosion to the satellite's power subsystem experiencing "a sudden spike in temperature" followed by "an unrecoverable loss of attitude control."

The US Air Force currently has six DMSP satellites in service and had launched the DMSP-F13 satellite back in 1995, making it the oldest continually operational satellite among its DMSP network of weather satellites. However, the US Air Force had assigned a back-up role to the DMSP-F13 satellite almost 10 years ago and since then, the satellite has been not involved in weather forecast modeling and continued to collect only data.

Since the satellite was not being used by the US Air Force's National Weather Service or the Air Force's Weather Agency, the US Air Force expects the impact of the satellite's loss to be "minimal." However, it does expect the loss to slightly reduce the amount of real-time weather data used for tactical users.

Meanwhile, the US Air Force will continue to track the debris caused by the explosion, which has contributed further to the increasing amount of space junk orbiting around the Earth. NASA estimates 20,000 pieces of junk to be orbiting the Earth that must be mapped and tracked to ensure that it does not come in the way of anything leaving or entering the planet's atmosphere.