It was a 400-kilogram (880 lb) spacecraft, which was built by the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, and was used as a radar calibration target for anti-ballistic missile tests.

[1] Kosmos 558 was successfully launched into low Earth orbit at 13:19:58 UTC on 17 May 1973.

[2] The launch took place from Site 133/1 at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome,[3] and used a Kosmos-2I 63SM carrier rocket.

[4] The North American Aerospace Defense Command assigned it the catalogue number 06645.

Kosmos 558 was the sixty-second of seventy-nine DS-P1-Yu satellites to be launched,[1] and the fifty-sixth of seventy-two to successfully reach orbit.