Mission Shakti Is Progress, But ASAT Leads To Dangerous Space Debris Flying At 30,000 Kmph

Early yesterday, PM Narendra Modi went on live television to make an announcement. India had demonstrated the capability to destroy a satellite in orbit, becoming the fourth nation to do so.

But through all the celebration and national pride, there's one thing we forgot.

ISRO

As part of the ASAT missile test, we shot down one of our own defunct satellites, orbiting about 300km up. We destroyed the hunk of metal, prompting Modi to call Mission Shakti "an unprecedented achievement". The problem is, while this is certainly a step towards progress for India, it's actually two steps back for the world as a whole.

You see, what we essentially just did was explode a satellite in zero gravity, sending god knows how many pieces of space junk speeding into orbit. That's bad news for India and the rest of the world too, because you do not want your satellite colliding with space junk. Or worse, a crewed station like the ISS.

When exploded into orbit, metal structures don't create a giant fireball. Instead, they generate a cloud of largely metal debris that zooms around the Earth at about 30,000 km/h. At that speed, the size of a piece of debris doesn't matter much. Even a piece of aluminium or chipped paint can puncture the hull of a spacecraft and render it useless. So, having roving death clouds in the same area we put satellites is obviously bad for a world where people are reliant on the Internet for much of their daily lives.

To clarify, India's ASAT test was against a missile that was in an extremely low orbit. As such, the DRDO has said the debris should deorbit very soon, and burn up in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, it's not possible to accurately predict where every piece of debris from an explosion is going to fly, so it's possible some of it has been thrown into a higher orbit.

NASA

Now, agencies like the US Department of Defense and NASA keep track of debris fields, so it's likely they were informed of this test. That does mean however that they have to track a couple more clouds of junk now. But India's Mission Shakti demonstration isn't unique in that regard, it's in fact not even the worst.

That dubious honour goes to China for their own ASAT test in 2007. During that incident, the country destroyed a 750kg weather satellite with a missile, creating a cloud of debris with more than 2,300 pieces the size of a ping pong ball or larger. There were also 35,000 pieces larger than a fingernail and an estimated 150,000 pieces smaller than that, almost impossible to track. Even today, NASA and other satellite operators still have to worry about all that debris.

The thing is, there's an even more complicated fear at work here. Debris clouds make satellite and manned mission launches problematic right? Well what about if countries actually begin using these space deterrents in earnest? Perhaps, if we're lucky, it won't be enough to kick off a space war. But even blowing up each others' satellites in orbit is bad for all of us, because of something called the Kessler effect.

It's named after Donald Kessler, a former NASA astrophysicist who first described the possible phenomenon in 1978. His idea states that one collision with space debris, will likely generate an even bigger cloud of junk, and so on, and so on. Eventually, we'll have an orbital layer that's just full of space junk zipping past. Some of it is probably slowing down as it gradually dips towards the Earth, but not very quickly. So any space launches would be stalled until that situation resolves itself.

Basically, we'd be trapping ourselves on Earth within a dangerous metal cage of our own making.

It's not a very distant possibility either. Not just countries, even private corporations are launching their own satellites, some even doing it without the proper licenses. So we have an ample amount of structures in orbit just waiting for that one piece of debris to collide and set off a chain reaction. And ASAT missiles are to this situation like holding a lit match over a barrel of gasoline.

In that sense, it seems India took precautions to minimize the risks as much as possible here. Unfortunately the very existence of our ASAT missile is a push to other countries that they need to develop the capability as well. And the technology is like nuclear missiles in that way. It's a deterrent only if no one ever uses it. Unfortunately, because ASAT missiles are designed to hit satellites and not cause a loss of life, there's a higher likelihood we're going to see them used.

Perhaps instead, we should be working with other countries to solidify a more concrete space treaty, one that can be enforced by organisations like the UN. A treaty that prevents countries from laying claim to areas of space, and also sets us up with definite objectives to declutter our orbit of space junk, for the sake of our spacefaring future.