- It's really impressive how you blew up our stuff…
Photo by NASA on Unsplash
Imagine you’re a satellite, fulfilling your sacred duty and delivering messages and such around the earth. You’re just sitting there, doing your job, minding your own business, when, WHAM! You’re exploded by a missile. Well, this poor satellite just had that happen to them…
India made a move that Prime Minister Narendra Modi said was to establish India “as a space power.”
India shot a missile that destroyed a satellite. NASA is calling India’s anti-satellite missile a “terrible, terrible thing.” The International Space Station is in great danger from the explosion. As well as to the six people who are currently on board.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is saying that the pieces from the explosion are a grave danger to the people on the ISS. The satellite, being shattered into many pieces, is big enough to threaten the safety of the people, but too small to track.
Likewise, it is unclear exactly how many pieces there are.
”What we are tracking right now, objects big enough to track — we’re talking 10 cm bigger— about 60 pieces have tracked,” Bridenstine said. He reported that twenty-four of those pieces were traveling above the ISS. The satellite that exploded had been orbiting 185 miles above the earth. The ISS is roughly about two hundred fifty miles above the earth.
Administrator Bridenstine said “That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station. That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight.”
He said that the risk of collision for the ISS has increased by forty-four percent in ten days. “We modeled 6,500 fragments, basically those that were larger than half a centimeter.” the vice president of engineering for Analytical Graphics, Tom Johnson, said. India’s top scientists said last week that the country had been expecting the debris to burn out in the Earth’s atmosphere in about 45 days.
The chief of India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation, G. Satheesh Reddy told Reuter: “That’s why we did it at lower altitude — it will vanish in no time. The debris is moving right now. How much debris, we are trying to work out. Our calculations are it should be dying down within 45 days.”
That’s right, they on purposely destroyed our satellite. Patrick Shanahan, the acting US Defense Secretary, warned the day after India’s test that the event would create a “mess” in space.
I wonder if anyone now considers India a “space power,” after that display…