Garry you are right about that orbits are very predictable, but that is for your own satellites ,equiped with gps, laser mirriors and other tracking equipement etc and you dont actualy have the data of your enemy coming in, these kind of predictions/models are very accurate (can be few cm) but any other orbit which u “passivly” track is not so accurate, the ratio (fault/actual height) is perhaps small enough but with this “passive” tracking the order can be several km. Also when using such an Anti satellite missile i presumme that you want to predict the orbit a bit ahead (intercept) perhaps and then you have to moddel the orbit which is also very difficult and timeconsuming (computers). The debris tracked have often a error of couple hundred meters.
two of the things which have an quite big influance on the orbit of a satellite.
– The gravity field of the earth, which is not overal the same, also the mass shifting inside/ouside earth etc. In the image (down) you can see a model of the gravity
– The Drag (especially in the low orbit regions to +-500 km its still very disturbing), depends on solar activity, properties of the athmosphere
There are other (many) factors to , planets, solar radiation pressure etc. You can understand why its even more difficult to do this for classified satellites (of the enemy). Also i was talkin in the beginning about the past methods. It was centred more to the the unknown enemy satellites. obviously nowadays satellites designed to be tracked etc, like gps satellites orbits can have an accuracy of less then one cm to few mm.
offtopic but Perhaps interesting to see a picture, have an idea of some debris around the planes being tracked
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