Charles Apple

Well, it’s over. The military is telling us that the modified SM-3 missile fired by the USS Lake Erie struck the dying spy satellite US 193.

No word yet on whether or not critical pieces of debris — most notably a nearly-full tank of highly-poisonous hydrazine fuel — is expected to threaten populated areas.

Earlier today, however, the amazingly talented Stephen Beard — senior news artist for The Indianapolis Star — laid some e-mail on us:

I caught your thread on the spy satellite…

One thing that has struck me has been the liberties some 3D animators have taken with the facts. See these two attached screengrabs from a CNN animation.

In the first example, given everything I know about the Earth’s diameter (a shade or two under 8,000 miles), that soon-to-be-splintered satellite, is WAAAAYYYY beyond the 150 miles described in the stories. Hitting the thing at that range would be one hell of a shot:

In the second example, I think the animator has taken liberties with the size of the explosion. Maybe not. I thought explosions in oxygen-starved environs looked different, I guess:

I saw another animation on Good Morning America this morning that was just as over-the-top as this one.

Ha! Yes, I found that GMA video on the ABC web site. This is the spectacular fireball, I presume, to which you refer:

Not only that, but then we’re then left with red-hot, glowing satellite parts drifting in space:

Ah, ILM would be proud.

Except it won’t happen that way. Or, rather, it didn’t.

The missile used a “kinetic warhead,” meaning there was no explosive involved. Instead, the missile is designed to destroy its target by plowing into it at high speed.

In fact, the missile and the target were to collide at a combined speed of 22,000 mph.

So yes, debris. but no big, Death Star-like explosion.

—
UPDATE:

Perhaps they were right about the fireball after all. From the Thursday morning Associated Press story:

The military concluded that the missile had successfully shattered the satellite because trackers detected a fireball, which seemed to indicate the exploding hydrazine in the tank. [Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] said it was unlikely that the fireball could have been caused by anything other than the hydrazine. Also, a vapor cloud was detected, further suggesting the destruction of the fuel, Cartwright said.

Watch the video of the actual hit here.

—

Speaking of ABC news, I squirted Diet Coke out my nose when I saw this in a video about the dying spy satellite:

Ye gads, that is a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, attached to the International Space Station! It’s a good thing the folks at ABC weren’t in charge of pulling the trigger!

I saw a similar goof last week, too. While talking about the errant spy satellite, CNN ran this brief clip:

Yes, that’s the Hubble Space Telescope! Watch that CNN video here.

And NBC did the same damn thing earlier tonight:

Memo to the network news boys: Before you embarrass yourself further, please have someone who knows the subject look over your video before you toss it onto the airwaves. Running stock footage of a Soyuz, the ISS or the Hubble in a story about a spy satellite only damages your own credibility.

It’d be easy to find a technical expert to review your video. Any 14-year-old space geek could have spotted these miscues.

Sheesh.

While I’m on the topic, I found this image flashed onscreen today during an ABC video:

Does it look familiar? It should — that’s the hand-drawn pencil sketch made by one source of what the spy satellite might possibly look like. It was posted at the GlobalSecurity.org web site:

Charles Vick/GlobalSecurity.org
—

ABC used it, but without any qualifications or attribution. You may recall I was skittish about using it in my own piece for Tuesday’s Pilot, so I created a silhouette and used it as an icon.

Perhaps that was a wimpy solution. But it felt right. No authoritative source was found, as far as I know, for visual reference on the spy satellite.

I note with interest, though, that this sketch looks a hell of a lot more realistic when reversed out of black.

Read the AP story about the successful mission here.

—

UPDATE NO. 2:

Remember the graphic I built for Tuesday’s paper showing the spy satellite smackdown? Specifically, the online slideshow version that I created for Pilotonline?

Due to popular demand, our online folks today asked me to update all the text to the past tense and resend the slides. I made a couple other tweaks and added an aftermath slide — for a total of thirteen frames.

Please view my graphic slideshow — and push up my number of hits — here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Amusing stuff, Graphics, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.