The USS Lake Erie is a Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser used by the U.S. Navy. The ship is classified as AEGIS because it contains an Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System, which is used as a defense against ballistic missiles.

The missile was fired at approximately 9:26 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST) while the USS Lake Erie was in the Pacific Ocean northwest of Hawaii. The shoot-down had a ten-second window-of-opportunity as the satellite sped at about 17,000 miles (27,300 kilometers) per hour in its decaying polar orbit about the Earth.

In such a polar orbit, a healthy spy satellite would have been able to search almost the entire surface of the Earth.

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellite was about 153 miles (247 kilometers) in orbit about the Earth at the time of the missile launch.

A network of tracking instruments confirmed that the missile did impact the satellite. It was unknown, however, if the missile made a direct hit onto the hydrazine fuel tank. However, the military is confident, according to media reports, that it did in fact make a direct hit on the satellite.

The military was attempting to blow up the nearly full fuel tank, with about 1,000 pounds of toxic fuel onboard, in order to break up the frozen hydrazine so it would be destroyed in the atmosphere before contacting Earth’s surface and possibly doing harm.

The U.S. military stated that the pieces left over after the impact will begin to enter the Earth’s atmosphere within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, with a complete re-entry of all pieces within forty days. It will be known within 24-hours if the missile did succeed in breaking up the satellite into tiny pieces and making a direct hit on the fuel tank.

According to an Associated Press article the military has not tracked “nothing larger than a football.”

For additional information, please read the U.S. Navy article “Navy Succeeds In Intercepting Non-Functioning Satellite”.

For additional information on satellite USA 193/NROL-21, please read about the malfunctioning high-resolution spy satellite, which was first reported on January 28, 2008, in the iTWire article “Debris from out-of-control U.S. spy satellite likely to hit Earth.”