Originally Posted by
beardy
I don't follow either the Newtonian logic, nor the relevance of this. Would you be so kind as to expand please? Or did NASA get it wrong?
Basic orbital mechanics. You cannot raise the perigee of an orbiting body by giving it additional velocity at perigee; you can only change its apogee or inclination. Similarly, for a body in a circular orbit, you can either lower the perigee (leaving the apogee at the original altitude), or raise the apogee (leaving the perigee at the original altitude). The relevance is that it means that the debris will still spend part of its orbit at low altitude and will thus decay relatively rapidly.
NASA did not 'get it wrong'. They said (as I did) that it was an irresponsible act. I don't think that they have predicted that the debris will be highly persistent in the way that certain previous anti-satellite missile have been. They did, however, point out that solar minimum was a particularly bad time to have done this, which I hadn't thought of.