Originally Posted by
beardy
Thank you. Am I correct in assuming that some debris will pass through the ISS orbit altitude?
Do you assume constant energy? If so wouldn't the interceptor have increased the overall energy of the system?
I couldn't say, but all the people who are in a place to track the debris seem to think that at least some of the debris has an apogee higher than the ISS. I would imagine that the risk of a collision is fairly small, but it still seems unnecessary to have raised the risk at all.
No, you don't have to assume a constant energy. Any input of energy at perigee cannot influence the altitude of the perigee regardless of how much you add. Even so, assuming that the warhead was kinetic and the impact was close to head on (as the animations suggest), then the mean orbital velocity of the constituent parts of the satellite should have been lowered slightly. Nevertheless, the distribution of energy between individual fragments would have been very non-uniform, with some particles re-entering, and some being given a lot of additional energy.