Pat Flannery wrote:
The way I read it, the laser will hit the target satellite while its in
the the shadow of the Earth, then the ASAT will be launched and home in
on the laser light reflected off of it.

That gives your adversary O(12) hours of passes before nightfall
doesn't it (a bit of handwaving)? India does have a non-trivial Navy
and can project power via it, but I don't think anyone is asserting
they are yet a "global" Navy, so one would presume this is going to be
something happening over Indian (controlled) territory.

This should be a very workable system, as if all you want to do is
light up the satellite with a laser rather than damage it, your
laser beam can be of fairly low power.

As far as countermeasures to this system, the satellite could either
eject reflective decoys and hope the ASAT would home on one of
those, or shoot out some sort of gas or dust cloud that would get
between it and the ASAT (or between it and the laser) so the
reflected laser light couldn't be seen or is diffused enough so the
ASAT can't home on it.

A satellite surrounded by a cloud of dust isn't generally going to be
very useful will it?

Also, if the satellite is equipped with laser detectors (I'm fairly sure
our reconsats are after the Soviet attempts to blind their optics with
lasers) it could fire thrusters and move, so as to make the laser lose
its tracking lock on it.

Changing the orbit of the opponent's satellite isn't quite as good as
destroying or disabling it, but it still is at least a slight "win"
yes?

rick jones
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