US Satellites Dodging Chinese Missile Debris

GSGKT writes "Today's Washington Times runs a story about the increasing problem with space junk orbiting the earth. Debris from the anti-satellite missile test by the Chinese military last year threatens the integrity of more than 800 operating satellites, half of them belonging to the US. Two orbiting U.S. spacecraft were forced to change course to avoid being damaged soon after the incident. Air Force Brig. Gen. Ted Kresge, director of air, space and information operations at the Air Force Space Command in Colorado, estimates that "essentially (Chinese anti-satellite tests) increase the amount of space debris orbiting the Earth by about 20 percent", and the debris might threaten spacecraft for up to 100 years."

Comments

Re:maybe that's what the chinese wanted

[RockMFR]

RTFA.

According to the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the commercial communication satellite Orbcomm FM 36 maneuvered to avoid passing within about 123 feet of the debris field on April 6. A NASA Earth observation satellite Terra was moved June 22 to avoid coming within about 90 feet of the debris.

Great Weapon

[3DKnight]

This is probably the best "Denial" type weapon developed. In the case of the chinese, if there was ever a major threat to thier sovereignty they could make the whole orbit plane into a huge denial zone, crippling the more advanced nation that relies on that area, while giving themselves the advatage of using an army that hasn't learned to rely on satellites. the whole mentality of "if we can't have it, neither can you" works very well in warfare. Scorched earth... just taken to the next level.

Re:Well

[porkchop_d_clown]

made the space over China less habitable to spy satellites

You're not real familiar with how orbits work, are you?

Since that crap is in low orbit, I'm pretty sure it circles the entire planet every couple of hours.

Unless, of course, the Chinese have developed some sort of non-newtonian thruster system that lets their space trash hover in one place.

Re:Possible outcome.

[j. andrew rogers]

"The US military is completely dependant on their technology and the rest of the world knows it. Do their cruise missiles even work without GPS?"

The US has no weapon systems that are GPS guided and never has, precisely because it is vulnerable. The Chinese may have just now gotten around to developing anti-satellite technology, but the Soviet Union had it ages ago.

The core guidance package of US weapon systems is extremely high precision inertial navigation (all systems described as "GPS-guided" are actually inertial -- the media is a bit stupid about these things, as GPS is an optional untrusted overlay on inertial navigation systems). Some intelligent terrain following weapons also use optical geo-referencing. As a matter of policy going back to the Soviet Union days, the US military machine views satellite systems as "nice to have" but its infrastructure is pervasively designed to operate under the presumption that there are no satellites in orbit. The vulnerability of the US military to massive system outages is greatly overstated; the Soviet Union was a much bigger threat on this scale than the Chinese are, and the US military has always been pretty religious about designing systems whose functionality was robust and in the face of rapidly degrading military infrastructure and relatively decentralized. It is easy to forget it, but the Chinese have nothing on the old Soviet Union in terms of technology and force numbers, and that was the doctrinal enemy of much of the modern US military.

Re:Well

[S.O.B.]

The satellite and resulting debris field in question are in low Earth orbit not geostationary orbit and therefore do not remain over the same location on Earth.