ASAT Test Update

Navy Missile Hits Spy Satellite, AP

“A missile launched from a Navy cruiser soared 130 miles above the Pacific and smashed a dying and potentially deadly U.S. spy satellite Wednesday, the Pentagon said. Several defense officials said it apparently achieved the main aim of destroying an onboard tank of toxic fuel.”

Department of Defense Background Briefing on the Satellite Intercept Attempt

“So we’re now into the window, okay, the length of the window. There’s some significant ambiguity at the back end of the window, based, as I said at the time, on how high the atmosphere is on any given day, because that then tells you when the satellite naturally would start to hit the atmosphere. So we want to catch it before it naturally hits the atmosphere, because when it hits the atmosphere, it tumbles and it’s next to impossible to track. So we’re pretty comfortable right now that we’ll have windows available to us through about the 29th or 30th. And then after that it will really start to become, let’s say, more ambiguous, because we’re trying to predict the weather out that far. So that’s kind of the period, starting today and running basically out to about the 29th.”

Editor’s note: “30th” – of February? I would think these military types would have a slightly better command of the calendar than this. Isn’t that sort of thing sort of useful when calculating orbits? (good catch Kevin S.)