Northrop Grumman introduced two satellites in 2019 and 2020, which reached the first geosynchronous orbit. Northrop satellites, which he calls Mission Extension vehicles, took control of two aging commercial communication satellites, which have low fuel levels, maneuvering them to recent locations and allowing them to continue their business for several years. It is effortless to notice that this type of technology can be used for commercial or military purposes.
But these mission extension vehicles are not able to transfer fluids from one satellite to another. This is a step that China takes with the SJ-21 and SJ-25, probably with the fuel of hydrazine and tetroxide nitrogen, which most satellites exploit because they are burning with each other in contact.
The common commercial cell of the US Space Command, which collects unplasified data monitoring data to strengthen the army data, estimated the SJ-21 and SJ-25 satellites “connected” on July 2 and since then they remained together. The following film, released by S2A Systems, shows the SJ-25 approaching SJ-21 June 30.
Unclassified data do not confirm that two satellites actually did not do, but it probably happened. The satellites gathered or merged on June 13 and June 30, but separated again within a few hours. Perhaps these were practices, interrupted attempts at docking or sudden maneuvers to avoid nosy eyes of American military satellites GSSAP, which are approaching nearby.
Now SJ-21 and SJ-25 have been flying together for over five days without noticeable changes detected on the basis of ground telescopes. Thousands of miles above the equator two satellites appear only as dots in the viewfinder of these telescopes placed around the world.
What we don’t know
Comspoc is a company based in Pennsylvania, which collects and processes data from commercial satellite tracking sensors. Comspoc combines optical telescopic images with radar tracking data and passive radio frequency (RF), which exploit radio signals to measure the exact distances to satellites in space to obtain the best estimation of the position of the spacecraft.
“With most telescopes for 1 kilometer or half a kilometer, you will start to lose somewhere when they get closer,” said Paul Graziani, founder and general director of COMSPOC, in an interview with ARS. “I think that for every telescope it would be difficult, even really able to reach 100 meters. It seems that this is an episode for telescopes.”
Therefore, it is helpful to add radar and RF data to the mix.
“When you add it all, you become much better than 1 km kilometer [precision] It can be a scope, “said Joe Callaro, operational director of Comspoc.” RF tells you if part of this dot moves, and the other part is not, and even when they all become one pixel, you can say about it. “
Even then, companies such as Comspoc have a degree of uncertainty of their applications, unless Chinese or American officials constitute a more final statement.
“We don’t cooperate with the government,” said Callaro Ars before apparent docking last week. “We do not clean it. The fee that I have for my team is that we will not claim what is happening. We will only say what our software gives us. We can say:” Here are the elements, here is visual, but what it means and what it does, we will not say. “