Russia launched a military satellite to orbit on Friday (May 22), and the mission generated plenty of action in the downward direction as well.

The Soyuz successfully delivered the satellite to its intended orbit, the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced Friday afternoon. .

"The slow speed, about 6 kilometres per second, is a very telltale sign that it is space junk," Jonti Horner, an astrophysics professor at the University of Southern Queensland, told the ABC!

(Asteroids and other space rocks that slam into our atmosphere are going much faster than that.)!

Not every hunk of space junk comes down as quickly as this piece of the Soyuz did.

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