That’s so awesome, I

If you imagine an object in a circular orbit (which this was, as are all satellites suffering from atmospheric drag eventually), and perturb it a little, then for most perturbations the new orbit will contain a component of its length that is lower than the original orbit. This lower part will be where the air is thickest so it will dominate the drag and pull the apogee down until the orbit is circular again, after which it will spiral in to ground.

I think that means that when they broke up the satellite, the individual pieces came (or will come) down quicker than the unbroken satellite, even if you don’t count the braking effect of the increased surface area.

While they did indeed conduct the firing at the middle of totality, I’m sceptical this was a major factor – surely they would design a system like this to operate day and night, probably using radar for the actual, um, battle damage assessment. Still, an original twist on the old “eclipse in the middle of a battle” stories – perhaps in a future war the barbarians will defeat the USA by cunningly launching their attack when no eclipses are happening…

The satellite was on it’s way down. We hit it with a missile that shattered. This meant that the pieces (in a momentum conserving way) flew in all directions. All directions does not equal down. Some of this directions included up. Since the satellite was actually shattered by the missile, it was not shot down.

I remember Mir well. It was deliberately deorbited in a controlled manner that: 1) maximized how much the atmosphere would destroy it, and 2) would cause the chunks to fall over the (mostly) unoccupied South Pacific.

We had no control of US 193, this means it could enter the atmosphere on a path that limited destruction (remember the old Apollo and Gemini missions – angle of descent matters). If this happened over a populated area, then satellite parts (spy tech) and toxic fuel could both end up someplace less than desirable.

If you are going to make attacks, please be specific and think through what you’re saying. I’m not always going to be right, but scolding me like a disobedient student for unknown reasons is just rude.

Hey Andrew: here is a link to why Phil and I both said this shoot down eclipse were at the same time (there had been a story o S&T, but I can’t get to it due to a website error now) http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/19/018224&from=rss

Pam, you should know better!

I thought that you understood the physics of orbital dynamics and atmospheric drag better than this.

I would give you a D- in physics on this subject, because you should know better!