U.S. will try to shoot down spy satellite gone bad
The U.S. Government said it's going to try to shoot down that errant spy satellite out of the sky when its orbit decays to about 120 miles above Earth. It contains 1,000 pounds of hydrazine fuel, which "could turn into a toxic gas capable of causing deaths and injuries if it crashed in a populated area." They hope that by destroying the tank, the poison gas will disperse in the atmosphere without causing harm to living things.
In cases of controlled descents, the fuel can be burned off before reentry. But in the case of the errant spy satellite, ground controllers lost all communications shortly after it was launched in 2006, and the fuel tank remains full. U.S. officials were concerned that the fuel tank could survive reentry and that a crash landing in a populated area could disperse the hydrazine, which causes deadly effects similar to ammonia or chlorine.Link | More at Space.com...
Last year, China used a missile to shoot down one of its failing weather satellites and was harshly criticized by U.S. officials and others.
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I was about to send this to you, then figured you'd find it without my help...Sylvia
is this the US trying to "me, too!" on issue of shooting down satellites? we're as cool as china.
I thought that orbital decay was just an overused plot device from Star Trek. I mean, who can't determine atmospheric drag limits and then plot an orbit above it? Ahh, Sulu and Chekov, I owe you apologies....
Of course, the chances of a falling satellite actually harming anyone, hydrazine or no, is vanishingly close to nil.
More likely, the US wants to a) make sure all the spy stuff is obliterated and/or b) test their satellite-shooting-down capabilities.
Ya know, ya never know. Remember the KH-13 flap? Did it crash in South America or was that a meteorite? The official geology report sure looked "official".
oh, cmon, more space trash orbiting around at 10km/s, a few years more and nothing will 'ever' be able to leave the planet unless specifically fitted to withstand screwing blows, theres enough shit over there already, if they want to dump it i think they should just launch some kind of satellite able to fly around kicking other devices out of orbit and into re-entry course
Hugo Drax wanted for questioning.
And I read that the White House pushed this idea really hard. Has anyone heard _anyone_ in the military say it's a good idea?
I mean, why not just lease a good reliable vehicle -- a Soyuz, and go get the danged thing and turn the valve to bleed off the fuel?
Or send up something that can rendezvous and grab the thing and retrofire to bring it down.
But no, hit it from _underneath_ at high speed and knock half the pieces into higher orbit.
Really bright.
I guess we finally know the answer to the Fermi Paradox.
The aliens have been here all along running this planet into the ground so they can claim it as abandoned salvage. NO intelligent life here.
For those saying the chance of a falling satellite hitting anything remotely close to people so infinitesimally small. Read up about SkyLab http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/dangerous_reentries_000602.html
But no, hit it from _underneath_ at high speed and knock half the pieces into higher orbit.
Really bright.
That turns out not to be the case, if you think about it.
Orbits repeat. If you see something in orbit at a particular position and going in a particular direction then that same thing will pass back through the same point, going in the same direction, on the next orbit. (ignore that it won't be above the same point on the Earth)
When it passes through that same point it's going to have *come* from somewhere. That somewhere being exactly the *opposite* direction.
So .. you have something in an orbit low enough that it's hitting air friction. You hit it from below and bits of it go shooting significantly more upwards.
Ninety minutes later those same bits are going to go through that same point again, again heading upwards. Which means they'll be approaching that point from somewhere much lower down. Somewhere much further into the atmosphere, where they have more drag.
Chances are good that any bits you do manage to deflect upwards aren't going to complete their next orbit.
Did anyone else catch this little gem from the CNN posting on the subject?:
"Experts said that with three-quarters of Earth covered in water, there's a 25 percent chance the satellite's remnants will hit land."
Brilliant.
anyone calculate where any orbital garbage will end up if it's broken up high enough? Maybe in a slot favored by , oh, say, China?
On the news last night in Europe, the US government spokesmen were quoted as saying the shoot-down was to protect sensitive materials and data from getting into the wrong hands - *nothing* about hydrazine ... I suppose their leash was yanked hard during the night and this is now the approved excuse.
Nuff said.
- HC
yeah, I never swallowed the hydrazine story - it's nasty but it ain't plutonium. Who knows? How good are they at really keeping track of what's up there for the other side? Making sure there is no plausible evidence might just be about keeping a cover for something still up.
Or maybe some of the brass were staring at goats again.
The satellite hit by the Chinese ASAT was over 500 miles up - some of the debris will be a risk to other spacecraft for a long, long time. The American plan is to hit their satellite just before it reenters, so debris isn't around for long.
But c'mon - at least four spacecraft have reentered in the last month. Likely several spacecraft with hydrazine reenter each year. While chunks of metal might hit the ground, nothing like an intact fuel tank - still fuelled - is going to reach the ground. Dunno thier reason for tossing an ASAT at it, but it ain't hydrazine.
My guess is that it's the most politically correct way to demonstrate US ASAT capability in response to the Chinese test. "We had to! It was the responsible thing to do!"
>> lease a Soyuz, bleed off the fuel?
a) The Soyuz spacecraft in the pipeline are spoken for, allocated for ISS missions. I expect you'd need a year to prepare a new Soyuz and to train.
b) The US isn't likely to want a Russian spacecraft and crew near it's secret spy satellite.
c) Since no-one ever planned for the satellite to be visited in orbit, it's highly unlikely that it's designed for such on-orbit servicing.
It's hard enough on the ground. Just ask the the Rosetts probe technicians. The Ariane 5 launcher was grounded just before they were to launch, after Rosetta was fueled. They *eventually* found a way to get the hydrazine out, but not the oxidizer.
>> send up something that can rendezvous
Lots of people have been lobbying for a space tug. Congress hasn't seen a need to fund one.
>> hit it from _underneath_ at high speed and
>> knock half the pieces into higher orbit.
As someone else pointed out, what gets knocked further up, comes further down and burns up half an orbit later.
@Registrado: I mean, who can't determine atmospheric drag limits and then plot an orbit above it?
Like many things, it's a trade-off.
The atmosphere doesn't have a sharp cut-off, so atmospheric drag is a matter of degree. You have to trade that off against the extra fuel cost to reach a higher orbit and, in the case of a spy satellite, loss of resolution caused by the greater distance. If the satellite has a limited life-span for some other reason, there's no point at all; and if it has propulsion, as this one does (that's what the hydrazine is for), it may be better to use it to compensate for drag rather than select a higher orbit.
Finally, the article doesn't say whether the satellite reached its planned orbit or failed prior to that point.
I predict the missile will miss, and both the satellite and anti-satellite missile will come down in China.
I also predict that in completely unrelated developments, within a year China will be selling spy satellites and anti-satellite technology at knock down prices.
In my brain this would be just like a real-life version of Missile Command... now all they need is a rollerball joystick thingamy and enough credits :D
Wasn't it one of the Cloverfield theories that the monster was awakened/created by a satellite falling into the ocean? Hopefully it won't land near the uk :)
Didn't this already happen in 1997?
Sorry, 1999.
The ignorance shown by most of the posters is appalling.
First off, High school level Orbital math shows that it is impossible for an intercept of this nature to put debris into a higher orbit as orbit changes take TWO velocity changes. One to change the perigee, one to change the apogee.
Secondly, the SM3 missile that will be used to intercept the sat is a hit to kill. The SM3 can attain orbital altitude but has magnitudes less velocity than the sat. Imagine if you could throw a baseball high enough that high flying jet would fly into it. The damage to the jet would be because it is flying at 700mph & the baseball is essentially at rest. Using an SM3 to intercept a sat cannot add any velocity to the sat which will be deorbiting anyway within weeks.
Lastly, the reason everyone condemned the Chinese ASAT test is because their intercept took place at such a high altitude that debris will be a danger to spacecraft for thousands of years (http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/APR08/Event/84079). Debris from the coming event will be gone within weeks.
#8 Ankh:
You'd think that's how orbital mechanics work, but it's not.
To increase orbital altitude, you need to increase rotational velocity, that is velocity at the tangent to "down".
Simply pushing an object "up" will not increase it's orbital altitude. It will only increase its eccentricity.
If you think about it, you can't just go straight up and say "yay, I'm in orbit!". The hard part about getting into orbit is getting going fast enough to fall at the Earth and miss.
Geez, when I read this the first time, I immediately thought "They are going to blow into smaller pieces so that it will be easier to burn up on re-entry"
Isn't that what they are doing?
/Actually, my first thought was: "The Bush administration is pushing this? With their record, it will miss and we'll have TWO things hurtling to earth, a satellite and a MISSILE!"
(The missiles mysteriously redirect and hit targets in Iran.)
"Oops. Our bad."
I like NPR's coverage on this. They pretty much conclude that the risk to us is very, very small (hydrazine dissipates rapidly), and that there is most likely some other reason for it, such as to give an opportunity to the military to blow shit up. (my paraphrase, not their words).
Yeah PMHPARIS and GUYSMILEY are totally right. God people. It's not like it takes a rocket scientist to figure this stuff out.
Oh wait...
It does seem like the hydrazine would ignite on re-entry and eliminate any sensitive equipment very quickly.
I am just wondering if we'll be able to see anything from the ground with binoculars or a telescope.
Yes, orbital decay is real and not just something from Star Trek. I've learned a lot about this kind of thing from using Orbiter Space Flight Simulator in the last couple of years. Any orbiting body has a low point and high point along its orbit. As time passes these gradually get lower and higher unless a correction burn is made occasionally. That's what has happened with the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA has to go up every few years and manually adjust its orbit. They are only going to do it one more time, though, this year. Then they are apparently going to abandon it (even though its their greatest acheivement since Apollo). After that we'll be hearing about how Hubble is going to fall to Earth.
will this have any impact on the local environent? Im no expert but i wonder of the ramifacations of letting a load of apparently harmful gas loose in the atmosphere?
#25 as of the NPR report from Washington I heard all of 60 seconds ago, they are going with the hydrazine angle now.
Oh and totally unrelated, "The Bushes Care About Black People now, as long as the Telecomm Immunity bill passes today, that is.
Discounting the "must protteccct the childddrun from the eeevil hydrazine" theory, the two most likely explanations for the military's eagerness to blow up the satellite are that (a) they have a new kinetic kill weapon that they want to test, or (b) they've already done the math and they _know_ where it's going to land (more or less).
If (b) is the case, then presumably they've figured out that either (i) the satellite is likely to do a hard landing in a populated area or (ii) it's going to do a not-hard-enough landing on someone else's territory.
If (ii) is the case, that raises two more questions. One, how much of the sensitive material on a spy satellite would survive re-entry? They found substantial chunks of the shuttle Columbia, but Columbia was more aerodynamic than a spysat, came apart at a relatively low altitude and had already shed at least some velocity. The other question is, if the goal is to shred the satellite before it lands, will a kinetic weapon do the job, or are they going to have to blow it up?
For those who can't imagine the hydrazine tanks surviving re-entry: what you can imagine doesn't change what is true.
This link is from 2003. It proves that the possibility of the tank surviving re-entry is not something recently made up.
The best way to avoid the facts here is probably to make up a story about how the shuttle was designed to survive re-entry, whereas the satellite was not, so the shuttle gave its hydrazine tanks more protection, and one "just can't imagine" that the spy satellite being used in this bit of crypto-military theatrics would be in any way comparable.
I'm glad that there were already a couple of orbital mechanics literate responses to the shooting pieces into a higher orbit question, so I won't duplicate their comments.
However, re: re-entry and hydrazine, depending on what kind of hydrazine it is, it might actually make sense to insure it doesn't get to ground level. Unlike ammonia or chlorine, some propellant hydrazine compounds have lethal doses that are less than sensory threshold (they used to tell us, if you smell it, you're already dead). And with only a couple of parts per million in the air being dangerous, even a couple of pounds coming down in Manitowoc, WI (where Sputnik landed so there's precedence) could do a lot of people in.
The chances of hydrazine making it to the ground aren't much, but they are not zero. If they hit the satellite, the chance of an intact fuel system is pretty close to zero, which not only reduces the chances of ground contamination, but also will probably provide a nice light show as it all cooks off.
All that being said, when I first heard this I thought it was very interesting that this once in a lifetime event happens just after the Chinese demo/fiasco. I'm sure it's just a coincidence though.....
Tom, how is it avoiding facts to think that a tank inside a vehicle designed to survive re-entry would be more likely to survive than a tank on a vehicle not designed to survive re-entry?
I'm willing to accept that the tank might survive, but it seems likely that it wouldn't. But I don't know much at all about it, and nothing at all about this particular satellite. I suspect you're in the same position, so present facts and information rather than belittling others, please.
#8
Actually it is a good, and safer, idea. Read a physics text book, unless science scares you too much.
You know, I'd have a lot more respect for them if they just said, "We don't anyone getting their hands on our stuff. Oh, and we promised Bubba Bush he could push the button like on his Nintendo."
What's funny is that people are con'ed by half assed science all the time, see organic/cloned food. But now everyone is a skeptic concerning this satellite's fuel causing any dangers?
And Dculberson, how is Tom avoid the facts? If anything, he is pointing them out to all of us. His disregard for the "conspiracy" theory and you're ignorance doesn't mean you're right and he is wrong. Sorry he disagrees with the mob mentality, deal with it.
"Spy satellite?" Nah, it's the mother ship coming to pick up Dick Cheney. Turns out the model they sent down here was defective. Only he's decided he's not going back.
"Flawed theory!"
"Snarky comment about flawed theory!"
"Admonishment!"
"Defensive reply!"
"Conspiracy theory!"
"Harrumph!"
Nothing like a good ol' Science Slap-Fight.
I'm scared.
I gotta stop watching Jack Van Impe.
the only thing you can be sure of is that the government and military both will never tell you the truth.
Why should they?
Oooops! We missed! Sorry about that Iran...
#21 "High school level Orbital math"? What high school did you go to? By all means, inform those who don't know about eccentricity, but I sure as heck did not learn Orbital Math in high school. I'm still chuckling.
I don't buy it.
This is either a "signal" to China or Russia to back off, or there was something on that sattellite we're not supposed to know about.
Whether that's super-secret optics that can measure penis length from space, or some kind of elite breeder reactor, I don't know.
JeffJeffBobeff, the special case of circular orbits only needs high-school algebra. There are high schools that teach newtonian mechanics (gravity and orbits) -- I went to one. (But we only did the math for circular orbits.)
Let's assume that this vehicle wasn't actually launched as a target and actually cost $1billion.
A $billion, roughly, equals the entire lifetime income of 1000 average Americans.
Forty years of space sophistication, and the best we can do for this errant sat is to smash it? As we learned over and over throughout the 20th century: so much easier to destroy than to create.
Where's the remote-controlled towing vehicle? This OUGHT to be seen as a pathetic, inadequate, and embarrassing response.
When will mature leadership finally arrive in cowboy-land?
"Forty years of space sophistication, and the best we can do for this errant sat is to smash it? As we learned over and over throughout the 20th century: so much easier to destroy than to create."
If you consider the cost of designing, building, launching, and actively maintaining and utilizing a vehicle capable of this type of recovery - in between regularly scheduled shuttle launches anyway - then it's a no brainer, it wouldn't be worth the cost to save even a billion dollar satellite. Considering the current pace of this type of technology, it's probably outdated by now anyway.
Boy I just hate it too when people try to make space exploration seem unnecessary or too expensive. The benefits are huge in terms of economic productivity gains and new inventions produced by this type of frontierism, and we spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars more on health and human services in this country in any given year than we do on the space program.
I just don't buy the solve everybody's poverty problem first before doing anything else argument.
People, this is the US Military Industrial Complex reinventing itself. Space warfare has an advantage over terrestrial war, at least for the MIC--it's much more expensive, *and* the threats coming from space are potentially much more serious then even Communism or Al Qaida!
It's no coincidence that the Air Force has a larger space budget than NASA (or so i'm told, from the latest recruiting commercials)
Best joke about this was prompted by one of those amusing scraping accidents on Google News yesterday. The headline, scraped from the Washington Times, read: "US will down failed satellite." The photo beside it, scraped from some Turkish news site from an unrelated story, showed the Earth rising over the Moon.
This prompted questions like, sure the Moon has been a failure, but does it really deserve such treatment?
I don't understand why they don't just Initiate the Self Destruct Sequence, or (in the case of Bond-style satellite) push the big red button that says "Do Not Push."
I agree with the idea that somebody just wants to lob million $ missiles and see what happens.
Couldn't have anything to do with the plutonium payload that's on all these satellites.
Not that I discount the possibility that Junior is so excited to get to push a button on a space weapon that he's peeing his pants.
c'mon, they've only spilled the satellite plutonium three times so far.
space junk, it smashed my baby's head, and now my sally's dead...
but hey wouldnt the gases create a bigger hole in our ozone layer .... if it does then more uv light gets through .. and it can be more dangerous than the hydrozine .... why wouldnt we look this through before we acted .... i mean deadly gases ...
@14 "yeah, I never swallowed the hydrazine story - it's nasty but it ain't plutonium. Who knows?"
You wouldn't normally think of rocket fuel as toxic, but this stuff is. But the main problem is that it's inside a (presumably very strong) tank.
The primary problem is that it's *1,000 pounds" or *half a ton* of fuel. Considering the quantity of this stuff makes it an entirely different ballgame. The reason being that it most likely will not explode, meaning that it will burn (kinda like the Hindenburgh burned and did not really explode). Which means the relatively short reentry time will only be good enough to transform the hydrazine into a flaming blob. So, imagine not the toxic effects of gasoline falling from the sky, but rather the toxic effects of *flaming* gasoline from the sky. Furthermore, hydrazine is *a lot* more toxic than gasoline;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine#Safety
So, this napalm-from-space can indeed kill in more ways than one. It also doesn't hurt that most of the classified stuff should be pulverized. So shooting this thing down is a no-brainer.
in view of the American military's track record regarding giving a damn about the safety of the public,foreign civilians and their own men, I can't believe they will be primarily motivated by that in this instance.
well you are right ecletro but i dont see why they cant just try and push it on to another planet ... like pluto or on an asteroid ... thats what i was thinking ... but then i thought if it would change course and hit earth any way so im still thinking pluto. im not sure but what if we found a way to go up there then sorta freeze the hydrazine ... and bring it back down so we can dispose of it here ... in like a lab or something ... but i really dont think missles would work .. i mean they have to think .. what if we miss .. then hit the moon or something then before we know it little pieces of the moon will be hitting us from every direction hitting every country and every state ....
Well, it's done now. Just got posted on MSNBC that the missle has been fired. Won't know the outcome for certain for a day or two.
they claim a hit