Russian Anti-Satellite Weapon Causes Emergency On Space Station

hello it's scott manley here this morning i woke up to some serious drama on the international space station astronauts and cosmonauts had secured the station and they had retreated into their descent vehicles because of concerns about a potential debris strike from a cloud of debris now we regularly hear about debris threatening the international space station sometimes they just retreat to the descent vehicles other times the space station actually makes maneuvers around known objects like last week the space station made a 0.7 meters per second burn to avoid a large piece of debris but hearing about a cloud of debris is vastly more concerning because that means a large number of objects that are very close together that means a spacecraft which has recently broken up like in the last few hours and you know people immediately started looking around doing their internet detective work trying to figure out what this cloud of debris was coming from you know it's not unknown for satellites to just spontaneously break up after being on orbit for years you know satellites include pressurized tanks with propellant they include batteries which have chemicals in them satellites breaking up is not that uncommon it's ideally something you don't want to have but as investigation moved on it very quickly became clear this wasn't a random accident this was actually a test of a russian anti-satellite missile you taking the orbit of the space station it was noticed that it was passing over this other satellite that broken up this other satellite had passed exactly over a no-fly zone that had been created by russian military because they said they were going to be doing a space launch this no-fly zone exactly matched previous tests of their anti-satellite system they've run about 10 different tests it looks like this is the first actual live test against a real target and unfortunately it's now created a whole lot of space debris and a whole lot of angst and aggro for everybody working in space yeah this is a the satellite is a former soviet satellite it's the cosmos 1408 which is believed to be a selena d electronic intelligence satellite that was launched in 1982 probably operated for a couple of years and now it's been space debris ever since in the last four decades or so it has sunk slowly down until it's at an altitude of about 480 kilometers which is still higher than the international space station but it's still very much in space and very much likely to take you know maybe several years to come back down now the this was hit by some sort of satellite there was now many objects being observed the first value i saw was 13 and that since the as the day has gone by is now up to like 1300. but concerns over this over the unknowns rather than what we did know was what caused the call for the international space station to lock down they closed number of hatches they retreated into secure modules they made sure the spacecraft were accessible i believe matthias murderer said that he wanted to sleep hugging a spacesuit because it makes him feel more secure i i don't know anyway it looks like they may be able to come out of this now that we're starting to learn more about the cloud but it is not ideal looking at the debris that has been seen uh it looks like the spacecraft which was about 480 is now spread between 440 and 520 kilometers and you know the space station orbits at about 420 so that is below this initial cloud but you have to realize those altitude ranges are for the objects that we can see there are many things that are too small to see and if you hit something heavy i just with a certain force you know you get a lower velocity than if you hit something light the lighter things that get kicked are likely spread beyond this range of debris therefore the space station is very likely already crossing orbits with things that are potentially dangerous um you know just for reference starlink is higher up it's about 550 potentially there's debris getting up there at the tiangong station i think is maybe 300 380 i'm not sure but that's maybe below but as stuff decays it could potentially you know be a thing for the chinese space station now the debris you know we know what happened or we know roughly what happened because the orbits will lead back to the same time and place so you imagine that you have a single object and they're split into many objects and as it orbits over time gravity is going to spread these things out along the orbit until we have light like a complete ring and then over time the uh because of the various altitudes and because of the oblateness of the earth this will spread out until it covers the entire earth the the actual chance per orbit of an impact doesn't really change that much as a result of this it just means that the chance is all concentrated in one place right now and over time it'll spread out so the weapon that was used is believed to be an a235 noodle right it's a direct ascent anti-satellite missile which is also an anti-ballistic missile system so it's the a235 is supposed to be the successor to the a 135 which is also a direct ascent missile system the difference is that it is you know decades old and it has a 10 kiloton nuclear warhead to shoot things out of the sky because the guidance isn't as good nowadays electronic guidance on these spacecraft or these weapons mean that they can get away with a much smaller conventional warhead and that actually is sort of important from a strategic point of view because you don't ever want to be using nuclear weapons unless you're starting a nuclear war whereas you can use a conventional weapon to shoot down things and have a little less um political problems and or nuclear warheads coming your way and by the way the a135 is in no way related to the american asm 135 which was the anti-ballistic it was the anti-satellite system that was mounted or launched from an f-15 because let's be clear russia is not the only country to have tested an anti-satellite system they just happen to have done a very irresponsible one in the last 24 hours consider that in the 21st century we've seen china do one of the worst which was shooting a satellite down it was about 700 kilometers a high that debris is going to be on orbit probably till the end of this century on the other hand india had a target which was about 300 kilometers up it believed it might have been a target specifically launched for their demonstration and two years later i think there's only one fragment of that left up there also in the 21st century um the us operation burnt frost is where they they decided to shoot down a us observation you know reconnaissance satellite they said that they wanted to shoot it down because it was deorbiting after failing you know after it failed on orbit very early on and never got to its target orbit and it was orbit was decaying so u.s military said well don't worry about all that highly toxic propellant in that tank we'll shoot it and make sure that that tank is ruptured and the stuff is not going anywhere and will save you all and i'm sure that that was possibly a very small part of it but they were more likely more concerned about having a highly classified spy satellite up there wanting to make sure it came down in as many pieces as possible so look russia's version um they picked an old soviet satellite which had been on orbit for decades and unfortunately it's kind of high up i would have really preferred they had a satellite that was lower down but they didn't have any they didn't want to spend the money to launch a specific target at a lower altitude um yeah so right now it looks like they're we're tracking about 1300 objects and i say tracking probably don't have good orbits for many of these because you have to obviously observe it over multiple orbits and if you're looking at a bunch of white dots moving across the sky figuring out which white dot is the same white dot you saw 90 minutes ago it's not in a trivial process so we're going to get better and better orbital elements and figure out just how many objects there are we will probably find many more objects as observation and illumination changes and then there will be many thousands of objects that we will never find because they are so small but just because you're too small to be seen from hundreds of miles away does not mean that you are not dangerous because moving at five kilometers per second gives you a huge amount of energy and the you know you you talk about bullets these are much worse than bullets they're traveling ten times the velocity when the impact they can because they can be seriously yeah they can seriously mess up your day so also this isn't a great look for a country which is a leading partner in the international space station program to you know create a debris event which directly threatens the international space station over the coming years uh i expect that most people at ross cosmos had no idea this was going on i mean this is a russian military operation i won't be surprised if the higher-ups and ross cosmos knew this was happening but probably couldn't do anything about it i mean i wouldn't be surprised if the russian military basically asked rogerson you know his opinion and he probably would have said please don't do this this is a really stupid thing to do and then say well maybe ross cosmos will send up another satellite target for us and he said yeah i get no money i can't do that look we don't know what's going on but what i do know is that ross cosmos is having a meeting with nasa tomorrow in russia because they had representatives of the space station program in russia for a completely unrelated meeting and now we're going to be talking about uh this other thing which is just not not a great look yeah um i'm hoping that for all this drama we don't actually see any major consequences from this but equally what the heck seriously at some point i hope we stop doing these stupid things i mean i was mad at china for like deliberately like not deorbiting their boosters safely but this this is a whole different league of willful disregard for the low earth environment and frankly i hope it's the very last one i'm scott manley fly safe [Music] you

Channel: Scott Manley

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Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021