[Closed] What gun for shooting down a satellite?

If you shoot down that Black Knight thing and it really is aliens, we'd be in big trouble.

isn't the more applicable question what bunker to hide in to avoid being obliterated by falling satelites ?

[url= http://www.space.com/29332-doomed-russian-progress-59-falling-spacecraft.html ]Progress 59[/url]

Oi sod off! 😀

This should do it.... It worked back in the 80's

[img] [/img]This should do it....

Many uses

@Quirrel - remove the s from https in your link ?

Is it nor what Reagan invented Star Wars for?

Nah, Star Wars was for anti-ICBM, something that the Standard Block 2 or 3 can do now (just).

Depends what you wanted to do to the satellite I guess. I still think a bloody great big laser would do the job. Just destroy the solar panels and heatshields and it's effectively useless.

Surely, if it's in a stable orbit, shooting it full of hole isn't going to do much as the bits will still stay up there going round and round and round and....

Theoretically you could take out a satellite by driving a ford focus to ASDA.

http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/are-satellites-experiencing-the-effects-of-global-warming/.

No gun, just a bow and arrow fired by a Tasmin Archer

Surely, if it's in a stable orbit, shooting it full of hole isn't going to do much as the bits will still stay up there going round and round and round and....

Well, that is the principle behind a general satellite destroyer, send up a warhead full of ball-bearings and a charge to blow it up in a horizontal fashion, the expanding cloud of small objects at orbital velocity with trash anything in a geosynchronous orbit, that's more-or-less equatorial. Polar orbiters would still be affected, but not as much.
Trouble is, that's a sort of scorched-earth, answer, because it's totally indiscriminate, and will turn everyone's birds to junk eventually. Geostationary birds will be unaffected, because they sit 22,236 miles out.
Individual targeting specific satellites from the ground either requires ground launched missiles, or tech that's still not fully developed; high-powered lasers, which are being installed on shipping to target aircraft and missiles, but might struggle power-wise to hit an orbiter, or a rail-gun, being developed, but will need a lot of poke to start lobbing chunks of ice or other projectiles into LEO.
Even small paint flakes travel,ing at 17,000mph can cause damage, imagine what tens of thousands of 5-10mm steel balls travelling at that speed would do.

Surely, if it's in a stable orbit, shooting it full of hole isn't going to do much as the bits will still stay up there going round and round and round and....

No, becuase in order to be in a stable orbit you need a constant speed. If you blow something up then by definition the bits have a different speed to the original thing. Some will fly off into space, some might go up a bit and then come back down, some will be directed towards earth.

the rebel giant breast and nipple gun on Hoth, that'd do the job!

No, becuase in order to be in a stable orbit you need a constant speed

only if it's circular

But if the rail gun is on a conveyor belt, would it take off?

No, becuase in order to be in a stable orbit you need a constant speed

only if it's circular

I should have said 'specific' speed to match your trajectory.. If you introduce a random extra and quite large impulse to lots of bits of satellite then chance are most of them won't stay in orbit at all never mind in the same place.

depends what you call a "large impulse"?

a few tonnes of satellite travelling at 7km/s being hit by a "bullet" is probably not what i'd call a large impulse. debris will continue largely in the same orbit, but will disperse, some higher, some lower, and air drag will affect everything a bit differently.

2 satellites of a few tonnes each, both travelling at 7km/s could be a big impulse.

in orbit, both have happened, more than once.

how long the c**p stays there is still being monitored. we've had to manoevre to avoid such debris (although having to manoeuvre because of "genuine" orbiting object much more common), and had to track an extra 20,000 objects from one day to the next. because a lot of it all stays up there for a long time.

edit: the kosmos/iridium collision seems to have had about 1/4 of the bits burnup within 3 years. the rest is in slowly decaying orbits.
other bits can potentially stay in orbit (even if not near the orbit of the original object) for centuries.