USSR and ASAT Testing
posted Thursday March 8, 2007 under by paul_kerrI did a short post about a good ACT piece by Wade which contains a short discussion of Soviet ASAT testing.
In other news, someone at an event the other night said they recognized me from my avatar. Weird.
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The Boese sidebar on the Soviet ASAT system was somewhat misleading and also apparently did not benefit from the latest research on this system.
For starters, it is misleading to state that the “targets” did not release debris. It was the attacker that generated the debris in the form of a shotgun blast aimed at the target. Much of the debris produced from these tests was probably too small to track. A better question to ask would be how much total debris was produced from those tests? No definitive answer can be produced because most of the debris was too small to track from the ground, but it should be possible to generate estimates. Given that the Soviets tested this weapon multiple times over many years, it is safe to say that Soviet ASAT tests produced MUCH more space debris than the single US test which gets all the attention.
Furthermore, rather than relying on a 1985 OTA report, the author might cite the work of Dr. Asif Siddiqi, who has written a history of the Soviet weapon based upon Russian sources.
— Dwayne Day · Mar 8, 11:14 AM ·
Reply from Wade:
The post by Mr. Day is missing the point of my original article. It would be a really safe bet that almost everybody reading about China’s January ASAT test outside of Arms Control Today: 1) was informed in a sentence or clause that the Soviet Union conducted ASAT tests, and 2)assumed that the Soviet Union must have destroyed a target satellite similar to the way China recently did. They would be wrong. To be sure, the Soviet interceptor system employed an explosive conventional device, but its target was never shattered into pieces.
The article was not about assessing or comparing total debris creation. It also was not a comprehensive assessment of Soviet ASAT programs or current Russian ASAT capabilities. Inclusion of the 1985 OT&A finding was to simply point out that the U.S. government at that time assessed the Soviet program as a security threat.
— Paul · Mar 8, 03:37 PM ·
“To be sure, the Soviet interceptor system employed an explosive conventional device, but its target was never shattered into pieces.”
Which is essentially missing the forest for the trees. Yes, the targets of numerous Soviet ASAT tests were not “shattered,” but the kill method clearly produced significant amounts of debris.
In fact, if memory serves, one of the initial misunderstandings about the Soviet co-orbital ASAT held by Western observers concerned this issue. They saw two objects merge and when they only saw a debris cloud and a single object, they assumed that the debris cloud was the target, not the attacker. It proved to be the other way around.
To answer the “so what?” question that people might ask, because it is the debris that poses a risk to other space objects, the key issue is how much debris is produced, not which object produces it during an ASAT attack.
— Dwayne Day · Mar 9, 10:08 AM ·
Just to add to my earlier comment: according to a colleague who pays attention to this stuff (i.e. what is in orbit), whereas all of the debris from the 1985 US ASAT test has reentered, several hundred trackable pieces of debris from earlier Soviet co-orbital ASAT tests remain in orbit. Most of those, he notes, are from the first series of tests starting in the late 1960s up until the late 1970s. The reason is that, unlike the US ASAT test, the Soviet ASAT tests were both a) orbital, and b) much higher. As a result, more debris stayed in orbit for a longer time. That debris still remains a thread to satellites today.
— Dwayne Day · Mar 12, 03:41 PM ·