An 8-kg Russian nanosatellite launched in 2009 on a five-year mission to test the craft’s laser-ranging. The 17-cm-wide craft (commonly known as BLITS) consists of two outer hemispheres made of a low-refraction-index glass and an inner ball lens made of a high-refraction-index glass. The craft’s experimental spherical retroreflector was designed by the Federal State Unitary Enterprise–Institute for Precision Engineering centre in Moscow under a 2006 agreement between ROSCOSMOS and the International Laser Ranging Service. BLITS launched on 17 September 2009 from Baikonur Cosmodrome as a secondary payload to the Meteor-M-1 mission, which launched a Russian weather satellite. The satellite was to conduct studies for five years, but the mission ended prematurely when a fragment of the exploded Fengyun 1C satellite impacted it, rendering the Meteor-M-1 inoperative.