#asat

Sept 13, 1985: Maj. Doug Pearson in an F-15 pulled a wild zoom climb and became the first and only pilot ever to shoot down a satellite from an aircraft.... 345 miles up, pure kinetic kill.

41 years later, no other jet or pilot on Earth has repeated it.

We proved fighters could reach space… then stopped.

@Fahadnbiem via X

The extensive cloud of debris Russia’s anti-satellite test created

Early this week, Russia launched a missile that destroyed the country’s Kosmos 1408 satellite, a large spacecraft that orbited the Earth roughly 300 miles up. The breakup of the satellite created at least 1,500 pieces of trackable fragments, according to the US State Department, as well as thousands of smaller pieces that cannot be tracked. 

All of those pieces are still in low Earth orbit, moving at thousands of miles an hour and posing a threat to any objects that might cross their path. Initially, that even included the International Space Station, with crew members on board forced to take shelter in their spacecrafts as the debris cloud from the satellite passed by the ISS a couple of times.

It’s going to take weeks or even months to fully understand just how bad the situation is, but early visualizations of the ASAT test created by satellite trackers show an extensive trail of space debris left in the wake of the breakup. 

The fragments appear like a dotted snake in orbit, stretching out and moving in roughly the same direction that Kosmos 1408 used to move around Earth. And there’s one thing the visualizers agree on: this snake of debris isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. “There will be some potential collision risk to most satellites in [low Earth orbit] from the fragmentation of Cosmos 1408 over the next few years to decades,” LeoLabs, a private space tracking company in the US sais.

Top: Northern Lights over Houston, Texas, on Oct. 29, 2003. Credit: Christie Ponder

Bottom: A simulation of  orbital position errors caused by a moderate geomagnetic storm for 2,653 objects in the USAF catalog. From "Flying Through Uncertainty."

Spaceweather.com Time Machine - Nov 16, 2021

SPACE WEATHER AND THE RUSSIAN ASAT STRIKE: Russia just destroyed one of its own satellites.  On Nov. 15, 2021, a missile launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome struck Kosmos 1408, shattering the old satellite into thousands of pieces.  Debris came so close to the ISS that astronauts took shelter in their crew capsules, just in case they had to abandon ship.                          

Littering Earth orbit with debris is never a good idea.  Space weather could make it much worse.  To understand why, turn back the clock 18 years to the Halloween Storms of October 2003, when our planet "lost" half its satellites.

Solar Cycle 23 was winding down.  Space weather forecasters were talking about how quiet things would soon become when suddenly, the sun unleashed two of the strongest solar flares of the Space Age: An X17 flare on Oct. 28th followed by an X10 flare on Oct. 29th.  Powerful CMEs struck Earth's magnetic field only 19 hours later, sparking 3 days of severe to extreme geomagnetic storms.

An "after action report" from NOAA lists some of the storm's side effects:  Commercial airlines scrambled to redirect flights from the poles, where radiation levels were suddenly high.  Each detour cost as much as $100,000.  Many Earth-orbiting satellites experienced reboots and even unwanted thruster firings.  Some operators simply gave up and turned off their instruments.  Goddard's Space Science Mission Operations Team estimates that 59% of NASA's Earth and space science satellites were affected.

There's a dawning awareness that something else important happened, too. Many of Earth's satellites were misplaced.

In a 2020 paper entitled "Flying Through Uncertainty,"   a team of researchers led by Thomas Berger at the University of Colorado's Space Weather Technology, Research, and Education Center report a little-known anecdote  from USAF satellite operators.  During the Halloween storms, they recalled, "the majority of [low Earth orbiting] satellites were temporarily lost, requiring several days of  around-the-clock work to reestablish [their positions]."

"The Halloween storms pumped an extra 3 Terrawatts of power into Earth's upper atmosphere," explains Martin Mlynczak, principal investigator of NASA's SABER spacecraft, which measured the energy dump. "We didn't feel it down on the planet's surface, but it was a big event for Earth orbiting satellites. The extra power puffed up the atmosphere, sharply increasing  aerodynamic drag."

Simulations show that even moderate geomagnetic storms can shift the   position of a satellite by 10 km or more.  The Halloween Storms created far larger uncertainties.  This is a problem because, when you're in a shooting gallery, you can't dodge the bullets unless you know where they are.

"Fortunately, the Halloween storm did not cause any major collisions that we know of," write Berger and his co-authors.  "But if a geomagnetic storm on the level of the 2003 event were to occur today, the situation could be very different. Most satellite operators today have never experienced anything like the Halloween 2003 storm."

Right now radars and telescopes in the United States Space Surveillance Network are surely working to pinpoint the debris of Kosmos 1408.  Orbital solutions will allow collision warnings to be issued; satellites can dodge.  However, a strong geomagnetic storm could wipe out their findings in an instant.