Two Russian satellites are drifting toward the orbit of a second US-registered radar satellite run by Finland's ICEYE, weeks after a sibling spacecraft closed to within about 500 meters of the first, and one analyst says that earlier pass "looks like an attack rehearsal."
Greg Gillinger, a senior space analyst at Integrity ISR and a former US Air Force intelligence officer who has tracked the satellites, told Reuters that Cosmos 2612 has since moved about 400 km (250 miles) away from ICEYE's X36, and that two sibling Russian satellites are now drifting toward the path of X37, according to the Daily Mail's account of the interview. COMSPOC, a US space-tracking firm, said the two were becoming increasingly well positioned to approach X37. Both ICEYE satellites are US-registered, according to public space-object catalogues.
Gillinger said such a close approach would not be needed for intelligence collection or electronic interference, which points to a test of kinetic attack-related capability. "This is the most aggressive posture I've seen Russia take in terms of threatening satellites from another nation," he said.
How It Got Here
Russia launched six Cosmos satellites, 2609 through 2614, on a Soyuz-2.1b rocket in April. Between May 14 and 20, Cosmos 2610, 2611, 2612 and 2613 each raised their orbital inclination by 0.8 degrees, from 97.0 to 97.8, putting them in nearly the same orbital plane as X36, Gillinger wrote in a May analysis. He cal
