Piece will go everywhere but the majority should deorbit after hitting that heavy piece of hallo!

It'd look a whole lot scarier if it was coming towards you at ~10 km.s^-1…

They simply decided not to use them because they are *secret*, so they used 20 year old technology disguised as new technology.

Using a super-secret-laser to take out your own broken satellite wouldn't be very smart. Enemies would realize that you have an advantage, and will quickly try to find out what it is. It's best to save that special play for the game really counts. They know that China, Russia, North Korea already knows about American ASATs, to there was nothing to lose.

I find the idea of "shooting a satellite down" to be a little more than naieve. It can't be done. Satellites are in orbit because of their large velocity. The only way to truely de-orbit them is to slow them down. Breaking them to pieces mearly makes a lot of little useless satellites that need to be tracked. Objects in the lower part of LEO will spiral back to Earth in a relatively 'short' time naturally because of atmospheric drag, but objects higher up will remain in orbit for a very long time (decades to thousands of years) whether they are large or tiny. The large ones are easy to track and avoid, but the smaller ones cannot be easily tracked and there are already far too many of them in orbit. They are a hazard to all space navigation and eventually one or more space missions WILL be seriously compromised by space junk unless we can clean it up. I would like to see an international ban on breaking spacecraft up in orbit by any method and it should have serious consequences for any state, company, or individual that ignores the ban for any reason. ASAT systems that leave many small pieces in orbit are hazards to all future space missions and have no place in a serious space fairing nation's arsenal because in the long run they are as dangerous to the perpetrator as they are to all other spacefairers. Breaking satellites up in orbit is totally irresponsible. As one responder mentioned above there are other ways to neutralize space weapons and surveillance equipment if necessary. At least keep them in one big piece so they can be tracked.

Ron

Or you could wrap some wire around its solar panels, shorting them out.

Or you could use tools to cut into it or cut cables or fuel lines, whatever is exposed.

Or you could zap it with microwaves, frying the electronics inside.

I'm sure the military has thought of every one of these ideas and I bet every one of them is included in the current technology, which of course would be classified.

You grab it and burn a retro rocket. Or you pack it into a reentry cone if you want to keep the technology. But honestly how much space junk will remain in orbit for long? Most of it is too small or to slow (after the collision half of the material is probably knocked out of orbit promptly) to stay around. The biggest concerns are many sats. that are just left around in high orbits.

In any event, the design was for a small satellite with a long "fly swatter" or "tennis racquet" arm. A fleet of such vehicles would have been parked in various orbits, from which they could be called upon as needed.

More information on such weapons can be found at the below link:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/ke_asat.htm

*** Please note that details of this account may vary slightly from reality due to more than a decade of bit rot ***

Thank you Ian for another interesting story.