India's New Space Shield

The DRDO unveils its top secret anti-satellite missile with a spectacularly successful test.

- Raj Chengappa

On January 24 this year, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched a military satellite, Microsat-R, weighing around 750 kg, into a low earth orbit of 300 km in space from its launchpad in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, without revealing too many details of its configuration or purpose. ISRO scientists continued to monitor its progress as they do with the country’s other space assets.

There was, however, another scientific agency, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), that was also tracking the satellite for a vastly different purpose. In mid-2016, the Narendra Modi government had approved a top-secret project to develop an A-SAT or Anti-Satellite missile. A close-knit team headed by DRDO chief G. Satheesh Reddy worked on the project and information was kept to a need-to-know basis before the launch.

Reddy, a veteran missile man, knew the challenges involved in developing such a missile. He had been on the team that worked on a Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system for India which, in the past 15 years, had laid the foundation for the capability to track highspeed space objects—particularly missiles—and knock them out before they can strike any part of India.

Destroying a satellite in space, though, was far more complex than bringing down a missile. A satellite travels at an incredibly fast 7 km per second in space and has to be hit at a range of 300 km and above, compared to the maximum of 100-odd km that the BMD system is designed to strike. Most important was the precision with which the missile has to hit the target satellite for what is known as a kinetic kill. To neutralise a satellite, it has to hit it within an error margin of 5 cm—less than the size of your palm.