Weather could delay satellite shoot-down

[CommunityEditor]

The Pentagon is planning to shoot down a broken spy satellite expected to hit the Earth in early March, the Associated Press has learned.

U.S. officials said Thursday that the option preferred by the Bush administration will be to fire a missile from a Navy cruiser and shoot down the satellite, which is loaded with toxic jet fuel, before it enters Earth’s atmosphere.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the options will not be publicly discussed until an afternoon Pentagon briefing by Ambassador James Jeffries, deputy national security adviser; Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, according to the Defense Department.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman would not elaborate on the AP report during a meeting with reporters, noting that details would be forthcoming in the briefing. But he said he had no quarrel with the facts as presented.

The disabled satellite is expected to hit Earth the first week of March, AP reported. Officials said the Navy would likely shoot it down before then, using a special missile modified for the task.

Whitman said the U.S. has for “some time” been monitoring what he called a “nonfunctioning, decaying U.S. satellite.” He declined to provide a time frame, but said officials “have been looking at ways to mitigate the possible risk to human lives and to demonstrate our continuing commitment to safe and responsible space operations.”

Whitman said the satellite weighs about 2,500 pounds, including 1,000 pounds of the propellant hydrazine. He said that without taking action, parts of the satellite would likely survive re-entry, but that the U.S. action is being prompted primarily by the presence of the propellant.

Hydrazine can cause headache, nausea, accumulation of fluid in the lungs, seizures and coma in humans, and acute exposure also can damage the liver, kidneys and central nervous system, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Other details about the missile and the targeting were not immediately available. But the decision involves several U.S. agencies, including the Homeland Security and State departments.

Shooting down a satellite is particularly sensitive because of the controversy surrounding China’s anti-satellite test last year, when Beijing shot down one of its defunct weather satellites, drawing immediate criticism from the U.S. and other nations.


Article: http://www.militarytimes.com/news/20...tdown_080214w/

[CommunityEditor]

Long before the public learned in late January that a damaged U.S. spy satellite carrying toxic fuel was going to crash to Earth, the government secretly assembled a high-powered team of officials and scientists to study the feasibility of shooting it down with a missile.

The order to launch the crash program came Jan. 4, according to defense officials who described Friday how it came to fruition for a final go-ahead decision by President Bush this week. The officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition they not be identified because of the sensitivity of the work.

The initial order was twofold: Assess whether shooting down the satellite with a missile was even possible, and at the same time urgently piece together the technological tools it would take to succeed.

In a matter of weeks, three Navy warships — the Lake Erie, Decatur and Russell — were outfitted with modified Aegis anti-missile systems, the ships’ crews were trained for an unprecedented mission, and three SM-3 missiles were pulled off an assembly line and given a new guidance system.

The decision to attempt a shootdown was disclosed by the Pentagon on Thursday. On Friday, officials said it could happen next week, shortly after the space shuttle Atlantis returns from its current voyage at midweek. Officials want the Atlantis to be home to avoid the risk of being hit with satellite debris.

Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon on Friday that it’s difficult not only to hit the satellite but even to know the best time to shoot.

“It’s a bit of an imprecise science at this point,” Ham said.

With an eye to the possibility that the missile effort will fail, the government has placed six rescue teams across the country to be prepared to act if the satellite hits the U.S., according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency memo dated Feb. 14 and obtained by The Associated Press.

The spacecraft contains 1,000 pounds of hydrazine in a tank that is expected to survive re-entry and a fuel tank liner made of beryllium.

FEMA has prepared a guide for emergency responders that includes information about hydrazine and beryllium. The agency warns officials not to pick up any debris or provide mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to anyone who has inhaled hydrazine or beryllium.

The AP first reported Jan. 26 that the U.S. satellite had lost power and was going to crash to Earth by early March. Normally the government would simply let a dying spacecraft fall on its own, with minuscule odds that it would land in a populated area. But in this case, Bush was persuaded by advisers that it would be worth trying to shoot it down to reduce the risk from the on-board toxic fuel.

As a first of its kind, the shootdown scenario draws on a wide range of scientific and military technologies — from ships and radar sites in the Pacific to high-powered telescopes in Hawaii and elsewhere, to a specially fitted Air Force plane and a Navy ship that snoops on missile tests.

To kick off the planning, the government assembled a high-security team of about 200 people — Navy scientists and missile defense experts, representatives of defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, and scientists from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Lockheed manufactures of the Aegis system and Raytheon makes the SM-3 missile.

The Lake Erie, a cruiser that has participated in a dozen mostly successful tests to intercept a mock enemy missile in flight over the past six years, would take the first shot at the satellite at a distance of about 150 miles, just beyond the reach of Earth’s atmosphere.

The SM-3 missile aboard the Lake Erie is equipped with a heat-seeking sensor that has been modified in order to enable it to zero in on the satellite, whose heat “signature” is smaller than that of a ballistic missile in flight.

The SM-3 costs $9.5 million, not counting its one-of-a-kind modifications. It is designed to destroy its target not by detonating an explosive nearby but by slamming directly into the satellite at high speed.

Publicly, officials have expressed confidence that they will succeed in the intercept. Privately, some say there is a rising sense of anxiety, although the consequences of failure are not what they would be in war; if the missile misses, the bus-sized satellite will tumble to Earth on its own, with very small odds that the on-board tank of hydrazine — a toxic fuel — will harm any humans.

David Wright, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in an interview Friday he would put the odds of a successful intercept at no better than 50 percent. And he expressed concern that debris from a successful strike could harm the other objects in relatively low orbit.

Wright said the situation presents diplomatic as well as technological challenges for Washington. The Bush administration is trying to convince other countries that the shootdown plan is not a disguised means of developing a program to kill their orbiting communications and intelligence capabilities.

The State Department has instructed U.S. diplomats around the world to inform their host governments that the operation is aimed solely at protecting people from the danger posed by the onboard fuel.

“Our role is to reassure nations around the world as to the nature of what we are trying to do,” spokesman Sean McCormack said Friday. “It’s an attempt to try to protect populations on the ground.”


Article: http://www.militarytimes.com/news/20...otdown_080215/

[CommunityEditor]

The Navy will attempt to shoot down an unresponsive spy satellite before it enters the Earth’s atmosphere because of concerns that the rocket fuel on board could harm people when it crashes, U.S. officials said Thursday.

The Navy has been working on software modifications for three weeks and will deploy three Aegis-equipped ships to intercept the 5,000-pound National Reconnaissance Office imagery satellite somewhere in the northern hemisphere of the Pacific Ocean in the coming weeks, said Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Cartwright refused say which ships will be deployed or where they will go to fire. The Navy has three cruisers — the Shiloh, the Lake Erie and the Port Royal — equipped with ballistic missile defense capabilities, and 15 destroyers.

Cartwright said a “window of opportunity” for an attempt to shoot down the satellite with a ballistic missile will open in two to three days and is expected to last as long as seven to eight days.

If the first shot misses, the Navy will have two backup missiles and as long as two days to make a decision on a second attempt. The goals are to destroy the hydrazine rocket fuel and to push the satellite on a trajectory to land in the ocean, Cartwright said.

“If we fire at the satellite, the worst is that we miss. If we graze the satellite, we’re still better off because we’ll bring it down sooner and more predictably,” he said. “The regret factor of not acting clearly outweighs the regret factors of acting.”

If it is not intercepted, the satellite is expected to hit the atmosphere sometime in early March. The path it would take as it tumbled through the atmosphere would be “very, very unpredictable and impossible to engage,” Cartwright said.

But skeptics weren’t sure if the mission was more about safety, security or a form of space-weapons diplomacy — a way to respond to China, which tested its own anti-satellite weapon last year, and show Europe, where leaders oppose being included in a proposed U.S. missile-defense capability, that the system works.

“I just don’t buy it,” said Ivan Oelrich, vice president of the Strategic Security program for the Federation of American Scientists, of the U.S. case for destroying the satellite. There’s a very low probability that the satellite would hurt anyone; blasting it will scatter space junk into orbit; and it isn’t a good selling point for European opponents of President Bush’s proposed missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, he said.

Shooting down an incoming missile is one thing, Oelrich said, but shooting down a satellite is much simpler, and it won’t prove for doubters, including Russian president Vladimir Putin, that the American missile-defense system actually works on a hostile missile.

“They’ll try to cast it as this rogue cruise missile that’s headed towards a city,” Oelrich said, “but it’s not. This is a satellite. If it were a rock it would still be in orbit.”

For its part, the White House says it ordered the take-down because of concerns about the potential toxic effects of the satellite’s hydrazine fuel.

Hours after the December 2006 launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a Delta II rocket, the NRO lost contact with the satellite and has not been able to re-establish the connection. Because they have had no control over the satellite, there has been no way for the NRO to instruct it to burn off or even warm the frozen fuel, Cartwright said.

“We have had no way to communicate to invoke the safety measures that are already on the bird,” he said.

Officials said they expect about 2,800 pounds of debris — slightly more than half of the school-bus-sized craft — to survive re-entry, though the size of the pieces and the path they will take to the surface are impossible to predict.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said he expects the hydrazine tank to be the largest piece of debris, and while it will likely hit the Earth intact, “it will have been breached because it will have been ripped from the fuel lines,” he said.

Griffin estimated there will still be about 1,000 pounds of fuel in the 40-inch-diameter tank when it hits the Earth’s surface.

Exposure to hydrazine irritates the throat and lungs and eventually affects the central nervous system. Extended exposure can cause liver and kidney damage and is eventually fatal.

Cartwright said a similar, though much larger, hydrazine fuel tank survived when the space shuttle Columbia was destroyed on re-entry in February 2003. The tank came to rest in a wooded area in Texas, with the fuel mostly burned off, Cartwright said.

The satellite’s tank could contaminate an area the size of two football fields, Cartwright said.


Article: http://www.militarytimes.com/news/20...tdown_080214w/

[CommunityEditor]

HOUSTON — Military plans to shoot down a damaged U.S. spy satellite carrying toxic fuel will not concern the crew aboard the international space station, commander Peggy Whitson said Saturday.

The military hopes to smash the satellite as soon as next week — just before it enters Earth’s atmosphere — with a single missile fired from a Navy cruiser in the northern Pacific Ocean.

It was unclear how close the satellite will be to the space station when it is shot down. NASA referred questions to the Defense Department, which did not immediately return a message seeking clarification.

Whitson, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and French astronaut Leopold Eyharts will still be in orbit 215 miles above Earth when the satellite is targeted. The satellite will be about 150 miles up when the shot is fired.

Whitson said NASA and the Department of Defense “love the station crew” and would not put them in harm’s way.

“So, no, we’re not worried about it,” she said in a news conference with the 10-person shuttle-station crew.

Atlantis and its seven astronauts will be safely back on Earth before the Pentagon takes aim. NASA plans to open up the backup landing site in California to increase chances of an on-time landing next Wednesday even if weather is a problem in Florida.

Left alone, the satellite would be expected to hit Earth during the first week of March. About half of the 5,000-pound spacecraft would be expected to survive its blazing descent through the atmosphere and would scatter debris over several hundred miles.

Military and administration officials said the satellite is carrying fuel called hydrazine that could injure or even kill people who are near it when it hits the ground.

Known by its military designation U.S. 193, the satellite was launched in December 2006. It lost power and its central computer failed almost immediately afterward, leaving it uncontrollable. It carried a sophisticated and secret imaging sensor.

The astronauts aboard the orbiting shuttle-station complex focused their attention Saturday on the inside of the new Columbus lab.

They have all day Saturday and just half a day Sunday before the hatches between shuttle Atlantis and the international space station are sealed.

On Friday, a pair of spacewalking astronauts wrapped up work on the exterior of Columbus, installing a package of sun-gazing instruments as well as a huge box of radiation, orbital debris and other experiments.

During their 7½-hour spacewalk, Rex Walheim and Stanley Love also installed handrails on Columbus, and removed a broken gyroscope from the space station and loaded it into the shuttle for next week’s ride home.


Article: http://www.militarytimes.com/news/20...huttle_080216/

[CommunityEditor]

Sailors aboard the cruiser Lake Erie could attempt the Navy’s first-of-its-kind missile shot to destroy a broken spy satellite as soon as Wednesday evening, officials said Tuesday.

The Navy will use a modified SM-3 missile, leveraging the Aegis ballistic missile defense weapons system to shoot down the malfunctioning satellite, which Defense Department officials fear could potentially shower hazardous debris on Earth. The launch could take place as early as 9:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

The missile does not contain a warhead — it destroys its target using the force of the impact. The SM-3 is the same missile the Navy uses in its ballistic missile defense tests, but the three missiles modified for the satellite shoot-down have software alterations designed to hit the specific target, a Navy official told reporters Tuesday afternoon in a briefing at the Pentagon. The official requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the missile shot.

The National Geospatial Agency has issued an aircraft advisory warning aviators of hazardous operations in a large area of the North Pacific Ocean near Hawaii from 9:30 p.m. EST Wednesday evening to 12:00 a.m. Thursday setting off speculation that this will be the window the Navy uses to shoot down the satellite.

Ted Molczan, a satellite watcher who has been watching the failed spy satellite closely since its launch in 2006, has calculated it will pass directly over the area specified in the notifications for about three minutes around 10:30 p.m. EST Wednesday.

The cruiser Lake Erie will take the first shot, the official said. The ship is carrying one additional modified SM-3 as well. The destroyer Decatur will provide long-range surveillance and tracking and also has one modified SM-3 aboard, the Navy source said. A third ship, the destroyer Russell, will “likely” remain pierside in Hawaii to provide backup for the Decatur, another Navy source said. The Military Sealift Command missile range instrumentation ship Observation Island will also collect data and monitor the shoot, officials added.

Ultimately, the Navy is equipped to take three shots at the satellite, but there will be some period of time in between them, according to the Pentagon. Officials would not specify how long they would wait to try again if the first shot misses, nor would they reveal how often the broken satellite completes an orbit over the Earth. A typical Aegis BMD test, in which a warship destroys a test ballistic rocket fired from a range in Hawaii, lasts between 20 and 80 seconds.

The Pentagon first became aware of the potentially dangerous re-entry of the satellite early this year, according to press reports. The satellite, known as USA 193, experienced problems upon launch in 2006 and is roughly the size of school bus, DoD officials confirmed.

It took the Navy about six weeks to make the necessary modifications to the missiles and radars to “take it to sea with some degree of confidence,” the Navy official said at Tuesday’s briefing. The Navy had no prior capability to shoot down satellites and had previously “not explored that,” the source added.

The challenge for the Navy in hitting the satellite is the nature of the target, the official said. The satellite is “bigger and faster than a missile” and the target must be hit in the fuel tank, which remains full, the official said. The Defense Department will send out a statement within an hour of the missile’s launch, but it could take a day or longer to determine if the fuel tank was hit, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Tuesday.

The satellite does not have its own heat signature, so operators must rely on the sun to warm the target. The official described the orbiting satellite as a “cold body in space.”

Since January 2002, the Navy has a solid rate of success in its Aegis ballistic missile defense test program, hitting 12 of 14 targets so far. The tests have increased in complexity, most recently boasting a success hit of a separating target last December.

The cost of the shoot down is unclear, but an Aegis ballistic missile defense tests costs around $40 million, the source said. One SM-3 missile costs about $10 million.


Article: http://www.militarytimes.com/news/20...tdown_080219w/

[CommunityEditor]

Defense Secretary Robert Gates will make the final call to launch the missile that is intended to knockout an errant spy satellite, a senior military official told reporters Wednesday morning.

Normally, the ship’s captain — in this case, Capt. Randall Hendrickson of the cruiser Lake Erie — would give the order to launch. For this mission, however, Strategic Command chief Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton will advise Gates on the best time to shoot and Gates will contact Hendrickson to give the final go-ahead.

“It is unusual,” the senior military official acknowledged.

After defense sources indicated Tuesday the shoot-down could happen as early as Wednesday evening, they revised their predictions at a Wednesday morning Pentagon press briefing, saying that high seas in the Pacific Ocean could impede the launch. But the shoot-down has not yet officially been scrubbed.

The National Geospatial Agency has issued an advisory warning aviators and mariners of hazardous operations in a large area of the north Pacific Ocean near Hawaii from 9:30 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday to midnight Thursday, setting off speculation that this will be the window the Navy uses to shoot down the satellite.

The window for the shot began Wednesday and lasts until Feb. 29, the official added. In order for the shot to occur, the ship must be in a precise location with a window of time in the “tens of seconds” to launch. The shot will take place during daylight hours Hawaii time, the official explained, because the light will offer a “higher degree of confidence” that the satellite was hit.

The plan is to launch an SM-3 missile at the precise time when, if the shot is successful, debris from the satellite will fall to Earth over water. The debris trail is expected to fall in the first three revolutions of the satellite around the planet, which last approximately 90 minutes each, the official said.

The Navy will fire a modified SM-3 missile, using the Aegis ballistic missile defense weapons system to shoot down the malfunctioning satellite, which Defense Department officials fear could potentially shower hazardous debris.

The missile does not contain a warhead — it destroys its target using the force of the impact. The SM-3 is the same missile the Navy uses in its ballistic missile defense tests, but the three missiles modified for the satellite shoot-down have software alterations designed to hit the specific target, a Navy official told reporters Tuesday afternoon at the Pentagon. The official requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the missile shot.

Ultimately, the Navy is equipped to take three shots at the satellite, but there will be some period of time in between them, according to the Pentagon. Officials would not specify how long they would wait to try again if the first shot misses, nor would they reveal how often the broken satellite completes an orbit over the Earth. A typical Aegis BMD test, in which a warship destroys a test ballistic rocket fired from a range in Hawaii, lasts between 20 and 80 seconds.

The Pentagon first became aware of the potentially dangerous re-entry of the satellite early this year, according to press reports. The satellite, known as USA 193, experienced problems upon launch in 2006 and is roughly the size of school bus, DoD officials confirmed.

It took the Navy about six weeks to make the necessary modifications to the missiles and radars to “take it to sea with some degree of confidence,” the Navy official said at Tuesday’s briefing. The Navy had no prior capability to shoot down satellites and had previously “not explored that,” the source added.

The challenge for the Navy in hitting the satellite is the nature of the target, the official said. The satellite is “bigger and faster than a missile” and the target must be hit in the fuel tank, which remains full, the official said. The Defense Department will send out a statement within an hour of the missile’s launch, but it could take a day or longer to determine if the fuel tank was hit, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Tuesday.


Article: http://www.militarytimes.com/news/20...eshot_080220w/

[technomage1]

I have to be honest, I didn't think the Navy had a ghost of a chance of hitting that thing. I'm not insulting their skill in the least, rather it's very difficult to hit something that small moving that fast.

So congrats to the Navy on a job well done and a clean shoot.

[rexmundi]

BZ to the USN and others involved in this! What an accomplishment!
I hope when this is reported in the civilian press, they emphasize the variables involved: hitting a fairly small object 245 km up in the sky while it's travelling at 17000mph, all within a 10 second window while avoiding causing damage to people or infrastructure.
I hope they also address the differences between this shootdown and the Chinese shootdown last year:
This satellite was in a degrading orbit and would have reentered the atmosphere, possibly exposing humans to dangerous hydrazine fuel and possibly allowing sensitive technology to fall into foreign hands; the Chinese satellite was in a high orbit and posed no threat to anyone. It was merely a demonstration of their ASAT capabilities; the same thing which they are critisizing the US about.
The debris from this satellite will burn up upon reentry to the atmosphere without leaving a debris, while the Chinese satellite has left a debris field of around 10000 pieces in orbit, which poses a threat to other satellites.
While it's hypocritical of China to protest our satellite shootdown, talk is cheap and it can only benefit them to spread the perception that our actions are provocative. If the press reports this responsibly, explaining the differences in the two situations, while emphasizing the accomplishment that this was then I will be very surprised. I don't have much faith in the general population to figure out the facts for themselves without having spelled out explicitly.