Blue Collar Scientist

The BBC is reporting that Russia is claiming that the United States’ plans to “shoot down” an uncontrollable spy satellite in a decaying orbit is a cover for “testing of an anti-satellite weapon.”

“Speculations about the danger of the satellite hide preparations for the classical testing of an anti-satellite weapon,” a statement reported by Itar-Tass news agency said.

“Such testing essentially means the creation of a new type of strategic weapons,” it added.

Russia is wrong. Here’s how you can know this.

1. There really is a satellite in this decaying orbit. It is called USA 193, and you can go outside and see it if you want to. Observations have been reported all over the place, there are even pictures to be found, if you go looking, and video of the satellite has been played on the news in the United States, at least. Heavens Above has a page about the satellite that provides information about where the satellite is now, and how its orbit is decaying. As I write, it looks like the satellite just passed south of Anchorage and was probably pretty close to being visible from where I’m sitting.
2. If you can see something in the sky, you can measure its position. And if you can do that, you can calculate its orbit. I used to do this every clear night for asteroids. You take a few pictures, measure the asteroid’s position in each, and then do some computations that result in a description of where that asteroid is in space. Calculating the orbit of an asteroid is pretty hard, but there are freeware software programs that will do all the hard work for you. It turns out there are also similar programs that observers of Earth satellites use. So while the National Space Science Data Center has no real information about USA 193, at least one person has put the observations together and calculated an orbit. Orbits for Earth satellites are described in a standard format, and the numbers, called elements, at this page are in that standard format. They can be taken and plugged into SkyMap Pro or Starry Night or almost any other astronomy software to generate observability predictions for the satellite.
3. More to the point, you can take those elements and see that, indeed, this asteroid is orbiting in a very low orbit, and indeed, it really will decay and deorbit, probably sometime in March, if nothing is done about it.

In other words, this satellite is not a made-up thing. We can go out and look at it, and we know, for sure, certain things about it, and we know this from our own eyes, our own calculations - in other words, we know this by doing things that any reasonably-well informed space enthusiast can do - specialists and government spooks not needed.

Not only is this satellite not made up, but it is obviously not what you’d use to test an antisatellite weapon. If someone wants to shoot down a satellite in a real war, they’re going to go after surveillance or positioning system satellites in low Earth orbit, or communications satellites in very high orbits. If you look at USA 193, its considerably lower than a standard low Earth orbit. And it is losing altitude at a very high rate - not something you will find a useful satellite - a plausible target - doing.

In other words, this whole thing just doesn’t have the profile of a good antisatellite weapons test. Anyone designing a test, who ended up doing this, instead of putting a target into a standard low Earth or geosynchronous orbit, has come up with a very bad model of real-life conditions.

Not only that, but the reasons that the United States is offering for destroying this satellite make sense. The United States government says that there is hydrazine on this satellite, used as a propellant. This is quite plausible - hydrazine is used on hundreds of satellites, including in thrusters for the Space Shuttle, Russia’s own Soyuz manned spacecraft, and aboard the International Space Station.

The problem with hydrazine is twofold:

1. It is very toxic. At quite low concentrations, breathing it causes lung irritation and scarring. At higher concentrations, breathing it causes tremors, convulsions, and death. If it gets in your water and you ingest it, you can add nausea, neurological symptoms, and drowsiness to that list. It’s a carcinogen so it can kill you with a tumor years after exposure. It can damage or destroy your liver and kidneys, and screw up your reproductive organs and cause birth defects.
2. Tanks containing satellite fuel have a fairly high probability of surviving re-entry intact. They have large surface areas compared to their mass, and they can slow down very rapidly and fall to earth without burning up in the atmosphere. If that happens in this case, wherever that tank lands becomes a toxic substances dump, without any of the environmental controls or monitoring that real toxic substances dumps have. If that happens to be my backyard, I’d be really ticked off. (Edit to add: The Bad Astronomer points out that Astroprof has an excellent post about hydrazine, if you want to consult it.)

Oh - don’t believe me that fuel tanks can survive re-entry intact? You don’t have to. There are pictures:

That’s from this NASA page, but if you google this topic, there are dozens of examples you can turn up.

So it seems likely that the reasons given for shooting at this satellite are sound - it is full of a very hazardous substance, and poking some holes in it before it comes down will release that substance into space before re-entry. And that’s what you’d want to do if you had a big tank of hydrazine coming down.

Not only that, but there’s no apparent motive for shooting the satellite down if those tanks aren’t full of hydrazine. Hundreds of classified US satellites have de-orbited in the last few years, and none of them were blown up with an antisatellite missile. The main difference? USA 193 was launched recently, and was never able to be controlled. That means its fuel tanks are pretty full. All the other satellites that de-orbited worked properly, and their fuel was empty, or close to it, when it re-entered. It isn’t plausible that the US wants to blow up the satellite to keep secret technology from falling into enemy hands. Of the thousands of satellites with secret technology that have de-orbited since the space age began fifty years ago, hundreds must have landed in cold-war Russia and other places not friendly to the US. Why weren’t any of them “shot down?”

Besides, a smart engineer designs secret components in such a way that they are sure to destroy themselves in re-entry. (And fuel tanks aren’t secrets.)

Finally, there’s one more clue that Russia is promoting baloney on this issue:

“The decision to destroy the American satellite does not look harmless as they try to claim, especially at a time when the US has been evading negotiations on the limitation of an arms race in outer space,” the statement continued.

That’s right, they have an ulterior motive. They have teamed up with China and are badgering the United States to participate in treaty talks to limit or ban space weapons. Russia wants the United States to look like the bad guy (and maybe the US is - I haven’t really thought through an opinion on whether we should be involved in these talks).

I suppose it is worth pointing out that China has actually blown up satellites in viable orbits with advanced antisatellite weaponry that they acknowledged openly they were testing, and to date, the United States hasn’t - and the Russians are teamed up with China. They just want to take advantage of the circumstance to score political points. Otherwise, why would they say that the United States is “creating a new type of weapon,” when China has already has one?

So, what do I believe? I believe there is a secret satellite in a decaying orbit that has hazardous materials aboard and that the United States is going to punch some holes in the tanks containing the materials, and otherwise break up the satellite so that it falls harmlessly to Earth. I think the notion that we’d have to blow up secret technology on the satellite is insane. I think the Russians are just playing politics with their statement. And I think you should go outside and look at USA 193 so you can say you did!

I am sitting in the airport in Portland, Oregon, fresh from an outing to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. I was fortunate to fly first class from Anchorage to Orlando and back for the princely sum of twelve dollars (thanks to frequent-flier miles), but the cost of getting such a good ticket for such a good price is a lengthy ten-hour layover in Portland. Careful advance research revealed that the exhibit of China’s dinosaur and bird fossils, called China’s Ancient Giants, had opened at OMSI just a week ago.

Naturally, I left the airport and hopped a cab for this. I even packed my carry-on very carefully - with a maximum of, uh, minimalism, so that I could comfortably spend the day at OMSI.

First, let me report that OMSI gets crowded on a Saturday. Incredibly crowded. I stood in line for about twenty minutes to pay my admission. About 3/4 of the human beings in the place were under 12 years of age, and to them all the other people in the joint were completely invisible. Most of the kiddies were accompanied by what I presume were their genetic forebears - I deliberately don’t say parents, because from what I could see the reason many of them had brought their children to the museum was to preserve their living rooms from destruction by transferring the damage to a public place that had a high probability of overstimulating their unruly progeny.

Well, it’s my bad for going on a Saturday.

The quality of the exhibit was decidedly mixed. Many of the specimens were casts, and I have no problem with that - in fact, as I’ve said elsewhere, I think exhibiting casts of megafaunal fossils is a good thing. The thing is, they have to be good casts. Some of these weren’t. There was at least one fossil with most of the knee joint surface wiped out by what I presume was an internal support, which was colored as though it were bone, and which made the whole knee anatomy suspect to me. Also, casts should be declared as such, and these weren’t. Only the actual fossils were disclosed, and I’m pretty sure there were a few actual fossils I saw that weren’t labeled as such (because you wouldn’t mount casts with such heavy ironwork, I wouldn’t think). Finally, the specimens were poorly interpreted by the signs. The curator should go check out the Orlando Science Center and see how it should be done. I was grateful that I had carried a lot of my own dinosaur knowledge into the place and didn’t have to rely on the signs.

On the other hand, they did have actual fossils of actual Liaoning birds and feathered dinosaurs, which were most impressive. These were, by and large, in large display cases off to the side of the large mounts, and relatively neglected by the children. That’s a mixed blessing, if you ask me. It was great that I was able to take long looks at these fossils without getting jostled out of the way by an insistent seven year old boy whose mother is training her son for a career in the demolition derby. But it is a tremendous lost opportunity to not have children seeing, and understanding, these fossils that were only discovered in the last 15 years or so.

In some of these fossils, the wishbone was conspicuously visible. In others, it was conspicuously absent. Right there you’ve got an accessible educational opportunity, but most of the adults I chatted with about the specimens didn’t know what the difference was and couldn’t have cared less.

Still - I’ve now seen fossils of feathered dinosaurs. With obvious feathers, right there in the rock, where anyone can see them and say “hey, that’s a feather.”

That’s way cool.

I’ll also give them full credit for hanging some cladograms of dinosaurs, and for having some excellent interpretive material on dinosaur hips and pelvises. This is fundamental evolutionary information, right out of a 101 class (and fully understandable by sixth graders), and it is always nice to see an exhibit like this take the opportunity to do some teaching about details such as these.

The rest of the museum was well designed and I think better maintained than most examples in the genre. All of the little electrical gadgets that I played with were in good working order, which is not the norm at most science and technology museums. They also had a substantial amount of floor space devoted to ecology, and human anatomy and development. They also have a planetarium and something called an Omnimax movie theater, neither of which I sampled.

It was a great way to spend an afternoon - especially considering the alternative of sitting around in an airport all day, but it was good in its own right. I’d recommend the museum to anyone in Portland, or anyone who visits the city. I’d also recommend not going on the weekend - museum staff assures me that today was typically busy for a Saturday.