(Apologies for a hasty post..)
Indranil wrote:
It doesn't work that way Disha. I think you are confusing attitude with velocity vector. The velocity vector is mostly changing by virtue of gravity. The DVAC can affect it somewhat but not by a whole lot. The object is climbing at roughly 1.7 km/sec. It is not going to become 0 (or negative) in one second.
I might be, but what I am trying to say is that the Marco guy is thinking in straight line when the path will be actually elliptical.
My point is that
marco is assuming that from the photo ASAT hit the target "from below" and the fact that ASAT still has some ways to go (840 mtrs) means to assume it is going to hit the target "from below" would be false.
Let us say that ASAT's attitude at that point of time is 0.02 or 0.03 degrees offset towards the "up" direction, then it would have missed the ASAT if no further correction would have been taken - but the photo for Marco would be perfect!!
Here is another fact which Marco and its ilk are missing (but not pentagon or any serious space scientists of the world), DRDO said that the CEP was few centimeters. Let say the CEP is 27.5 centimeters to the target at 275 and that translates to a precision of 0.000001 (thumb rules, some zero may have been misplaced, but anything having some
Another way to look at it, it will take some 0.08 secs to cover 0.84 km at some 10 km/s and since it is rising at 1.7 km/sec, in that 0.08 seconds it would have risen some 1.5 mtrs (all thumb rule calculations). At that point it is either going to graze the target at top or hit as expected.
*Again all of the above are rough calculations and I am simplifying the problem tremendously. Point is, Marco cannot go about writing an article deriding an ASAT just by a photo and ignoring several such observations as above.