Dangerous parties: Russia acts in space while the US celebrates
Space monitoring startup LeoLabs says it has spotted a trend: Russia in particular, but also China, appear to be timing potentially threatening in-orbit activity to coincide with US holidays, presumably when fewer American skywatchers are actually observing.
“It could be done on purpose. It probably is,” Ed Lu, co-founder and chief technology officer of LeoLabs, told Breaking Defense.
The latest test took place on November 23, Thanksgiving Day in the United States, when the Russian Cosmos 2570 satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO) turned out to be a Matryoshka-style system comprising three smaller mini satellites that carried out operations in surrounding areas.
We've detected a secondary object in close proximity to Object C, a payload released by Russian satellite COSMOS 2570 around October 30.
Our radar measurements indicate that this newest object was released by Object C, possibly on November 23 at 14:00 UTC. pic.twitter.com/D2bDvPSoRU
— LeoLabs (@LeoLabs_Space) November 24, 2023
This “spawning” event mimicked the activity of Cosmos 2565, launched on November 30, 2022 and believed to be an electronic reconnaissance satellite, which released a daughter satellite (Cosmos 2566) on December 2 and which, in turn, released its satellite. own baby satellite on December 24 (Christmas Eve), according to LeoLabs.
Similarly, on November 25 and 26, 2022, LeoLabs said it observed the Chinese space plane, which Beijing calls Test Spacecraft 2, “conducting rendezvous and proximity operations” that involved a docking maneuver by a satellite released, Victoria Heath, LeoLabs team lead for communications and marketing, told Breaking Defense. A second docking “probably occurred” around Jan. 10, 2023, he said.
While it is unclear what the daughter satellites are doing, the deployment of sub-satellites “may be a method of deploying co-orbital ASATs [anti-satellite weapons] or covert payloads that could pose a risk to sensitive or classified satellites,” LeoLabs said. in an analysis of Russian operations provided to Breaking Defense.
Owen Marshall, space domain awareness analyst at LeoLabs, told Breaking Defense that convenient timing may allow some satellite maneuvers to go undetected for periods of time and thus provide adversaries with an “advantage in warfare.”
“So, the fact that you can release something, and if you can release it in such a way that no one notices that you released it, then you essentially have a secret payload up there without its launch. Until someone finds out, it remains hidden for some periods,” he explained.
The problems with these Matryoshka sub-satellites are twofold: on the one hand, it is not clear what their function is. For example, for one of the two satellites dropped from Cosmos 2570 there is doubt that it could be a kinetic instrument, that is, a weapon that can be used to eliminate other satellites that crash into it. Another, however, which then approached Cosmos 2570, i.e. the mother satellite, appears to be an observation satellite with yttrium sensors.
The second point is that the fact of being launched from already orbiting platforms makes it difficult to follow their evolutions. Now the control of objects in orbit is close to the limits of human capabilities, if they then divide and release other components. monitoring becomes almost impossible, and so does the control of the demilitarization of space.
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The article Dangerous parties: Russia acts in space while the US celebrates comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/feste-pericolose-la-russia-agisce-nello-spazio-mentre-gli-usa-festeggiano/ on Wed, 13 Dec 2023 16:25:45 +0000.