Syzdekistan

It has been about 10 days since the US Navy shot down a failed spy satellite. Here is a great article about the 48 pieces of the satellite that are still in orbit and being tracked. There is a bunch of great diagrams of the orbits of the fragments diverging and then converging along the original orbit of the satellite.

However, they all come together at the point in the upper right, over Asia, or at least they did yesterday morning. Of course the fragments themselves don’t converge at that point simultaneously, but their orbital tracks do.

That point is the relic of the original position of the satellite. It’s there because although many of these fragments may have higher orbits at apogee (the point farthest from the earth) they still come together at about the point where the satellite would have been. And so they will decay sooner rather than later, unlike the Chinese Feng Yun satellite, whose perigee was hundreds of kilometers farther up.

As for the political fall-out, here are some interesting questions and responses about the political side of the story.