A Starlink satellite has suffered an incident in orbit and has been lost.

“On Sunday, March 29, Starlink satellite 34343 experienced an anomaly on-orbit, resulting in loss of communications with the satellite at ~560 km above Earth,” Starlink posted on social media site X yesterday (March 30). “The SpaceX and Starlink teams are actively working to determine [the] root cause and will rapidly implement any necessary corrective actions.”

The company said the incident posed “no new risk” to the International Space Station, NASA’s Artemis II mission, or SpaceX’s latest Transporter-16 launch mission.

“We will continue to monitor the satellite along with any trackable debris and coordinate with NASA and the US Space Force,” it added.

Satellite and space debris tracking firm LeoLabs posted data suggesting a “fragmentation creation event” involving the Starlink machine, saying “tens of objects” were detected in its vicinity in the wake of the event.

“We've characterized this event as likely caused by an internal energetic source rather than a collision with space debris or another object,” LeoLabs said. “Due to the low altitude of the event, fragments from this anomaly will likely de-orbit within a few weeks.”

A similar incident occurred in December, with Starlink-35956 losing communications and suffering a sudden 4km decrease in its altitude after an unidentified anomaly caused the propellant tank to vent. That machine de-orbited in January, according to tracking data.

“These events illustrate the need for rapid characterization of anomalous events to enable clarity of the operating environment,” LeoLabs added.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has launched some 10,000 satellites since 2019. The company conducts thousands of collision avoidance measures annually and de-orbits hundreds of satellites per year.