Navy tasked with destroying satellite

By Gayle S. Putrich - Staff writerPosted : Thursday Feb 14, 2008 20:22:30 EST

The Navy will attempt to shoot down an unresponsive spy satellite before it enters the Earth’s atmosphere because of concerns that the rocket fuel on board could harm people when it crashes, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

The Navy has been working on software modifications for three weeks and will deploy three Aegis-equipped ships to intercept the 5,000-pound National Reconnaissance Office imagery satellite somewhere in the northern hemisphere of the Pacific Ocean in the coming weeks, said Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Cartwright refused say which ships will be deployed or where they will go to fire. The Navy has three cruisers — the Shiloh, the Lake Erie and the Port Royal — equipped with ballistic missile defense capabilities, and 15 destroyers.

Cartwright said a “window of opportunity” for an attempt to shoot down the satellite with a ballistic missile will open in two to three days and is expected to last as long as seven to eight days. If the first shot misses, the Navy will have two backup missiles and as long as two days to make a decision on a second attempt. The goals are to destroy the hydrazine rocket fuel and to push the satellite on a trajectory to land in the ocean, Cartwright said.

“If we fire at the satellite, the worst is that we miss. If we graze the satellite, we’re still better off because we’ll bring it down sooner and more predictably,” he said. “The regret factor of not acting clearly outweighs the regret factors of acting.”
If it is not intercepted, the satellite is expected to hit the atmosphere sometime in early March. The path it would take as it tumbled through the atmosphere would be “very, very unpredictable and impossible to engage,” Cartwright said.

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