Some of my coworkers do work related to orbital debris. I've learned a little bit by osmosis (mostly the right jargon to type into Google to get useful query re

Some of my coworkers do work related to orbital debris. I've learned a little bit by osmosis (mostly the right jargon to type into Google to get useful query results). The Soviet spacecraft were the slightly confusingly named US-A series, also called RORSAT in English. The Wikipedia article[1] is a good start, but you can find some more technical info if you search around for papers on "NaK droplets" [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A