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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.space
Subject: Re: Antisatellite weapon effectiveness
Message-ID: <5914@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 27-Aug-85 12:36:18 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.5914
Posted: Tue Aug 27 12:36:18 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 27-Aug-85 12:36:18 EDT
References: <1273@poseidon.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 27

> [The US antisatellite missile]
> contains no explosive, using sheer kinetic 
> energy alone to destroy the victim.
> 
> I'm sure it would punch a nice hole in
> a compact satellite and surely disable it....

Bear in mind that this thing strikes at essentially the full orbital
velocity of the satellite, about 8 kps.  The result is not a hole, but
a violent explosion, as both the interceptor and a fair chunk of its
target are vaporized by the impact.  The interceptor contains no explosive
because it's redundant at that velocity.

Large solar arrays are unattractive for military satellites anyway, because
they are too vulnerable to a handful of gravel arriving the same way.

> Enemy satellites could even have an infra-red
> emitter of some sort hanging out on a boom to
> misguide such expensive cannonballs.

This is a valid point; I don't know how they deal with countermeasures.
One obvious possibility is multi-wavelength sensors, since a small hot
object has a different infrared spectral distribution from a large cool
object.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry