Something to potentially watch: Cosmos 2542, a Russian inspection satellite, has recently synchronized its orbit with USA 245, an NRO KH11. A thread:pic.twitter.com/LqvYiIYBMd
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While they are in the same plane, the passes are typical of any two satellites in the same plane: taking place at a distance of a few hundred km every few days. Not in consistent view, and the most recent maneuvers did nothing to improve the viewing geometry with any of these.
Personally, I think the intelligence value of observations of optical spy satellites like this one are probably marginal. Their mirror dimensions are publicly known, and from there, it's just basic optics to calculate approximate capabilities.
This is all circumstantial evidence, but there are a hell of a lot of circumstances that make it look like a known Russian inspection satellite is currently inspecting a known US spy satellite.
A pretty thorough look of the satellite catalog can't produce another potential target that looks as good as this in terms of the orbits and viewing geometry. (End)
A much needed follow up to this thread, as it ended up with much more exposure than I expected.
The orbital elements for USA 245 were formulated and based on observations made by @HAMSATNL and shared through the SeeSat community.
http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Jan-2020/index.html …
They've all been doing this kind of analysis for longer than me, and have been very helpful for myself and others who have only been spinning up on satellite tracking in the more recent years.
And probably one last set of updates for a while, as @coastal8049 and @HAMSATNL have both provided additional observations on USA 245. The original analysis used the same orbit for USA 245 throughout because it was the only one I had on hand.
The orbit for USA 245 now uses:
1. An orbit estimate from January 31st from @HAMSATNL: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/Jan-2020/0008.html …
2. An orbit estimate from January 20th posted by @coastal8049: https://twitter.com/coastal8049/status/1219889619187027968?s=20 …
3. An orbit estimate from HAMSATNL from January 28th posted to his website.
The updated range between Cosmos 2542 and USA 245 is essentially the same as shown before up to the final state update on 1/28. Then, you see the range jump up to over 1000km. Still in view, but much further away. Cosmos 2542 didn't make a maneuver, so it looks like USA 245 did.pic.twitter.com/GPAHOSTMKE
Some initial analysis estimates that USA 245 made its maneuver on January 23rd, just 1 day after Cosmos 2542 synchronized its period, but with sparse state estimates like these, it's hard to make a solid match on just one epoch.
But to sum it up, with the additional observations, we can see that Cosmos 2542 probably only was close to USA 245 for a few days at most before 245 made a maneuver to start to drift away.
The orbits are still similar enough that they'll be in view of each other for at least a month, but at a much greater distance. Unless, of course, we see more maneuvers. A plot of the projected range through Feb is below.pic.twitter.com/Fb9GIUviTg
In the open source community, we'll all be keeping our eyes on USA 245, Cosmos 2542, and (but wait, there's more) Cosmos 2543, a small subsatellite that was deployed earlier in the mission.
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