Anti-satellite technology is any
weapon or tool that is developed to shoot down satellites in space. A-SAT technology works based on expelling a small,
hard projectile, called the ‘kinetic kill vehicle’ into a satellite. The
orbiting craft travels at such high speeds that something the size of a big
pebble hitting it would instantly break it up into hundreds of pieces. As the
orbit of a satellite is predictable and its location known at any given point
in time, developing an A-SAT weapon is far simpler than developing ballistic
anti-missile technology.
Mission Shakti was a technological
mission conducted by the DRDO from the Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Island launch
complex, off the coast of Odisha. The DRDO’s Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD)
interceptor was used. The success of Mission Shakti, in which an anti-satellite
(ASAT) missile destroyed a satellite orbiting 300 km in space, demonstrates
India's capability to protect itself from satellite surveillance in the event
of war as well as the ability to cripple the enemy's space-based communications
and navigation systems within the opening hours of a conflict.
Experts think that the satellite
that was brought down was the MicroSat-R, which was launched in January on the
PSLV-C44 mission.
Anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) are
space weapons designed to incapacitate or destroy satellites for strategic
military purposes. Several nations possess operational ASAT systems. Although
no ASAT system has yet been utilised in warfare, a few nations have shot down
their own satellites to demonstrate their ASAT capabilities in a show of force.
Only the United States, Russia (using MSB China, and India have demonstrated
this capability successfully.
Before India, only three nations
had demonstrated ASAT capability. Russia achieved the world's first ASAT kill
in 1968 when its killer satellite fired steel pellets to cripple a Soviet
satellite. In 1985 a missile fired by a US Air Force F-15 destroyed an old
American satellite orbiting at an altitude of 555 km. The Chinese test in 2007 involved
using a surface-to-air missile to destroy a defunct weather satellite.
Like China, India has also taken
the missile route, using the Agni-5 to deliver the boost capability and the
kill vehicle. In April 2013, after the successful Agni-5 ballistic missile
test, V.K. Saraswat, the then Defence Research & Development Organisation
director general and former scientific advisor to the Defence Minister, said
that apart from adding a new dimension to India's strategic defence, the
missile had "ushered in fantastic opportunities in building ASAT
weapons". He added that with advanced seekers the missile will be able to
home into the target satellite.
The theoretical maximum range of
the ASAT weapons is limited, which means that satellites above the range of
20,000 kilometers are out of range, This includes communication satellites as
well as global positioning system satellites. The low-earth orbits (LEO), which
tend to fly just a few hundred kilometers above the surface of the earth. Since
their orbit is small, they tend to loop around earth quite quickly. A lot of
the LEO satellites tend to follow the polar orbit, which means they pass above
both the north and south poles many times a day. These sit below the
medium-earth orbits (MEO) and are semi-synchronous. These are usually placed
around 20,000km above the earth’s surface, and pass the same points on the
equator multiple times a day.
In
India’s neighbourhood, China and Russia possess ASAT weapons, and there is a
fear that this could lead to a space-weaponization race in the region. United
States already has ASATs while Israel is also working on space defence
mechanisms that will involve the deployment of ASAT weapons.
A kinetic bombardment or a kinetic
orbital strike is the hypothetical act of attacking a planetary surface with an
inert projectile, where the destructive force comes from the kinetic energy of
the projectile impacting at very high speeds. The concept originated during the
Cold War.
satellites uses
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