The U.S. Defense Department today was circumspect in its description of the shoot-down of an ailing U.S. spy satellite yesterday. But a video from the Navy destroyer that took the shot shows the interceptor missile ascending and exploding, lending credence to the assumption that the strike was successful.
In a morning briefing at the Pentagon, Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, in California, reported the "breakup" of the de-orbiting satellite at 10:50 pm EST yesterday.
To illustrate the point, Gen. Cartwright ran the video above taken from the tracking system of the USS Lake Erie, which had fired the multi-stage SM-3 AEGIS missile at the crippled satellite, known as USA 193, over 150 statute miles above it.
He said the military is "very confident" that the missile hit the bus-size satellite and that it has a "a high degree of confidence" the exact target, the satellite's fuel tank containing a full complement of frozen hydrazine, was destroyed. He added that analysts are still studying the data and that the military was not yet ready to state that the dangerous rocket fuel was vaporized.
"But let me give you a sense of what we've got," Gen. Cartwright added. "We have a fireball, and given that there's no fuel, that would indicate that that's a hydrazine fire. We have a vapor cloud that formed. That, again, would be likely to be the hydrazine. We also have some spectral analysis from airborne platforms that indicate the presence of hydrazine after the intercept. So again, that would indicate to us that the hydrazine vented overboard in some quantity, and we're starting to see that in space."
He continued: "Any one of those as a stand-alone is not a smoking gun, so we're putting the pieces together. I would tell you that it's probably going to take us another 24 to 48 hours to get to a point where we are very comfortable with our analysis that we indeed breached the tank. The imagery that we have, the high-definition imagery that we have, indicates that we hit the spacecraft right in the area of the tank. So each of the pieces put together--we're pretty confident, but we're not standing there; I don't have a picture that shows you a tank."
Gen. Cartwright said the Pentagon will continue studying the debris field to come to a firm conclusion that the threat from the satellite has been completely eliminated.
Judging by what the images show, though, it looks as if this anti-satellite technology display by the U.S. was a complete success, at least militarily.
[See our Tech Talk entry from yesterday, After Shuttle Lands, U.S. Missile Knocks Out Spy Satellite, for more on the missile shoot-down.]
