The cruiser USS Lake Erie will return to Pearl Harbor tomorrow morning after firing a missile northwest of Hawaii that scored a hit on a failing U.S. military satellite.

At a Pentagon news briefing today, Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he had a "high degree of confidence" that a tank on the satellite with hydrazine rocket fuel had exploded.

Pieces no bigger than a football were detected after the impact.

Cartwright said the destroyer USS Decatur, which is out of San Diego, and the Pearl Harbor-based Lake Erie would return to port to have special modifications removed that were installed for the shoot-down.

Software changes made to the Decatur, Lake Erie and USS Russell — a destroyer out of Pearl Harbor — were one-time modifications, Cartwright said.

The U.S. has said the apparently successful satellite shoot-down is not part of space weapons development. The SM-3 missile used for the satellite intercept 153 miles above the Earth was modified from anti-ballistic missile testing.

The 567-foot Lake Erie, with a crew of about 350, has been used in recent years as a test-bed in the Pacific Missile Range Facility off Kauai for the nation's still-developing ballistic missile defense system.

The Russell stayed in port at Pearl Harbor as a backup ship and was ready to be used if there was a malfunction on one of the two other ships.