English: BLITS ("Ball Lens in The Space").
The BLITS nanosatellite was launched alongside the Meteor-M(1) spacecraft into a sun-synchronous 800km polar orbit by Russia in September 2009. BLITS is a 7kg, 17cm diameter glass ball with two kinds of refractive glass, a low-refraction-index glass shell surrounds a high-refraction-index glass core. One half of the surface of the whole sphere has an aluminum coating. BLITS was used as a target by the International Laser Ranging Service for precision laser ranging experiments. Its expected 5 year mission ended when it was struck by debris from the destroyed Chinese satellite Fengyun 1C. (Fengyun 1C was used as an anti-satellite weapon target by the Chinese government owners, some time before the collision in Jan 2013.)
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