China has tried what might be the first orbital fuel to the satellite

Northrop Grumman launched satellites in 2019 and 2020, which performed the first geographical orbit. Control of Northop satellites, called Mission Extension, from bright commercial contacts that are launched on fuel, and their variation to new sites and allow them to continue working for another several years. It is easy to see that this type of technology can be used for commercial or military purposes.

But these task extension vehicles do not have the ability to transfer fluids from one satellite to another. This is the step that China takes with the SJ-21 and SJ-25, and is supposed to be with the hydramean and nitrogen defenses, which are used by most satellites because they communicate with each other.

The joint commercial operations cell for the American Space Leadership, which collects the non-classified satellite monitoring data to support the sources of the army-classified data, has estimated the SJ-21 and SJ-25 “merged” on July 2 and remained together since then. The video below, released by S2a Systems, SJ-25 approaches the SJ-21 on June 30.

The non -classified data does not confirm that satellites have already been resistant, but this is probably what happened. The satellites met, or merged, on June 13 and June 30, but they separated again within a few hours. Perhaps this is the practice, the attempts to aborted, or the sudden maneuvers to avoid the eyes of intruders of the GSSAP satellites of the American army, close to a place.

Now, the SJ-21 and SJ-25 was flying together for more than five days without any clear changes that were discovered from the Earth’s telescopes. Thousands of miles above the equator, satellites appear only as a country in the offers of these telescopes around the world.

What we do not know

Comspoc is a company based in Pennsylvania that collects and process data from commercial satellite tracking sensors. Comspoc includes the visual telescope images with radar tracking and negative radio frequency data (RF), which uses radio signals to measure the micro -distances of satellite in space, to get the best possible estimate of the spacecraft position.

“With most telescopes one kilometer or half a kilometer, somewhere there, you will start losing it when they approach it,” Paul Graziani, founder and director of COMSPOC. “I think it will be difficult for any telescope, and even is really able to reach 100 meters. This seems to be an extension of telescopes.”

For this reason it is useful to add radar and RF data to the mix.

“When you add all of this together, it becomes much better than one kilometer (resolution) that may be the range,” said Joe Calro, COMSPOC Operations Manager. “RF tells you if part of that point is moving and the other part is not so, and even when they all become one pixel, you can know things about it.”

Even so, companies such as COMSPOC have an uncertainty in their conclusions unless Chinese or American officials make a more specific statement.

“We are not working with the government,” Callaro told ARS before last week. “We do not wipe this. The charge I have for my team is that we will not take assurances of what is going on. We will only tell what gives us our program as a solution. We can say,“ Here are the elements, here are the visual, but what it means and what it does, we will not confirm. “