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."

Re:Huh?

[NonSequor]

Half of the threatened satellites are American owned, not half of the debris.

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.

Re:Well

[andyfrommk]

The link in the summary points to page two of the article, here is the whole article [washingtontimes.com]

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:maybe that's what the chinese wanted

[Jeremy Erwin]

I'm going out on a limb here, but I will assume this is code for 2 spy satellites.

And I'm going to go out a limb here, and assume you didn't read the article.

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.

Of course, you could be using the Chinese definition of espionage, which is rather broad. Shame on you.

Re:Well

[rpj1288]

Once every 90-odd minutes, actually.

NIce try

[geekoid]

The US shot down a satellite in 1985 that was at an altitude of about 555KM. The pieces decayed from orbit pretty quickly.

I would like to see a complete ban on anti-satellite technology that results in there being any debris.

The Chinese test was pretty irresponsible and they could have proven that they have the capabilities through other means. The US test was in direct response to the USSRs test. One of the last cold war cock waving events.

That said, after Bush's little speech; which certainly implied that the US was allowed to go after satellites but would be upset if anyone else did it, I do understand why the Chinese did the test.

A couple more events like these and you can kiss your cell phone/GPS/non-local TV good by. OTOH. we would have a lot of shooting stars for a few dozen years.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps, if they have decided they will never need satellites of their own.

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:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's make sure we're clear here - the satellites in jeopardy do NOT all belong to the US government, nor are they spy satellites - they are commercial satellites; when someone else's stupid actions (e.g. Chinese anti-sat tests) impacts YOUR job and livelihood, you'd be as pissed about this as my coworkers and I (yes, I work for a US commercial satellite operator).

Re:The US is telling lies

[Anonymous Coward]

According to wikipedia there are ~10k trackable debris and 2k of these are from the chinese anti-satellite test. There's an estimated 35k untrackable smaller debris that can still pose a huge danger (such as going through an astronaut's head during space walk...).

Sure, the U.S. currently has a retarded administration that lies about most things, but does not mean that everything they say is always a lie. The Chinese were irresponsible in their test because they are space noobs -- get over it.

Re:Well

[AJWM]

but for the most part it just sits in one place above the earth

As long as that one place is somewhere on the equator, yes -- which China isn't.

Anyway geostationary orbit is about 22000 miles higher up than the orbits of the space trash and other satellites of interest.

Re:Well

[S.O.B.]

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

Re:Well

[russotto]

Naa, just wait until the cloud is in the right part of the orbit and detonate a big nuke in the upper atmosphere. This temporarily expands a portion of the upper atmosphere, causing the orbits of the junk to degrade faster. Pick the place such that the fallout falls on the vacation homes for the top Chinese officials. Nuclear weapons... is there anything they can't do?

Reminds me of an anime...

[Talgrath]

...called Planetes in which the main characters are space junkers, people who's job is to either destroy or salvage pieces of junk floating around in space because there's so much of it now that it threatens satellites in orbit.

Re:That's a laugh!

[untouchableForce]

Your idea about using up China's steel used to be correct. But more recently China has been purchasing steel from us because they can't make it fast enough. I used to work for a steel company's IT department (One of the largest in the world) and I can tell you that they were in serious trouble until China started booming and put the demand for steel and other metals through the roof. China is purchasing a significant amount of our steel and other building materials. That won't last long however since they're using it to build more steel and concrete plants.

Re:Possible outcome.

[j. andrew rogers]

"*cough*JDAM*cough*Tomahawk*cough*F-16*cough*
Sorry got something stupid stuck in my throat. Anyways as I was saying the US has plenty of weapons sytems that use GPS systems and would either become completely ineffective or seriously crippled without it."

As was pointed out elsewhere, neither JDAMs nor Tomahawks (nor F16s for that matter) use GPS guidance -- only technically ignorant tools claim that any US weapon systems use GPS guidance. Even rudimentary research shows that systems like JDAMs and Tomahawk get their navigation data from ultra-precise laser ring interferometers (an extremely precise solid-state optical accelerometer with a purpose similar to mechanical gyroscopes), with the ability to optionally accept GPS fine-tuning corrections. The precision of the inertial systems is classified, but it is generally known that it is apparently not much worse than the GPS corrected version for weapon targeting purposes (they may have already converged for all we know -- INS has been continuously improved, and it wasn't bad to start with). Note that this is also why jamming or toying with the GPS signal does not send bombs and such flying way off course; the inertial system only accepts corrections within the computed error bars of its own positioning data. If the GPS signal is outside those bars, the navigation system assumes the GPS has been compromised.

I just gotta love the armchair weapon designers who think that of the thousands of bright engineers that built all these weapons, it never occurred to anyone that someone might jam or disable the weak RF signal that is GPS. GPS is a convenience, not a necessity, and it would only have small impact on the efficacy of American weaponry -- by design. The reason the US military embeds inertial navigation in everything is precisely because it is essentially impervious to countermeasures short of altering the physics of the universe. For all we know, nominal GPS weapon targeting is largely for show and indirection, since it costs next to nothing to strap a GPS receiver on an inertial navigation system (and it would seem to have worked in that case, considering how much breathless idiocy is fixated on GPS weapon targeting).

As a point of trivia, the laser inertial navigation systems used by the US military were invented in the 1960s for some (failed) ballistic missile interceptor research. Even though the ABM research was a dead end, the laser ring gyro technology developed for the project paid dividends for the US military way out of proportion to the money expended on the ABM research.