Photos: Missile targets falling satellite

What do you do when a spy satellite goes kerflooey and starts to fall back to Earth? Call in the US Navy. That was what President Bush decided to do to take out said defunct satellite before it could crash-land, with the potential, the government says, of spewing a toxic fuel called hydrazine in a populated area.

At about 7:30 pm PST on Wednesday, the USS Lake Erie fired a single Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) that intercepted the satellite some 240 kilometres above the Pacific Ocean -- a relatively low altitude, the Pentagon said.

Credit: US Navy