Northrop Grumman launched two satellites in 2019 and 2020 that reached the first Dockings in Geosinchronic orbit. Northrop’s satellites, which he calls mission expansion vehicles, have control over two outdated commercial communication satellites that are low on fuel, which allow them to move to new places and allow them to work for a few more years. It is easy to see that this kind of technology can be used for commercial or military purposes.

But these vehicles for expanding the mission do not have the ability to transfer fluids from one satellite to another. This is the step China takes with SJ-21s and SJ-25, presumably with hydrazine and nitrogen-tacitual drivers, which use most satellites because they burn contact with each other.

The joint commercial operational cell of the US space command, which collects un-classified satellite monitoring data to strengthen the military’s classified data sources, “merged” the SJ-21s and SJ-25 satellites on July 2 and has remained together. The video below, released by S2A Systems, shows SJ-25 approaching SJ-25 on June 30.

The unclassified data does not confirm that the two satellites are actually trapped, but that is probably what happened. The satellites gathered on June 13 and 30, or merged, but separated within a few hours. It was possibly practice runs, aborted documents, or sudden maneuvers to avoid the greedy eyes of the US Army’s GSSAs Satellites in the area.

Now the SJ-21 and SJ-25 have been flying together for more than five days, without detectable changes on the soil-based telescopes. Thousands of miles over the equator, the two satellites appear only as dots in the seekers of these telescopes placed around the world.

What we don’t know

Comspoc is a company in Pennsylvania that collects and processes data from commercial satellite tracking sensors. Comspoc melts optical telescope images with radar tracking and passive radio frequency (RF) data, which uses radio signals to measure exact distances to satellites in space, to get the best possible estimate of the position of a spacecraft.

“With the most telescopes at 1 kilometer or a half kilometers, somewhere there, you’re going to start losing it when they get so close,” said Comspoc founder and CEO Paul Graziani in an interview with ARS. “I think it will be difficult for any telescope, even a very capable one, to get within 100 meters. It seems to be a piece for telescopes. ‘

Therefore, it is useful to add radar and RF data to the mixture.

“If you add it all together, you become much better than the 1 kilometer [precision] that it can be a scope, “says Joe Callaro, Comspoc’s director of operations.” RF tells you if part of the blob moves and the other part is not, and even if they all become one pixel, you can tell things about it. ‘

Even then, companies like Comspoc have some uncertainty in their conclusions, unless Chinese or US officials make a more definite statement.

“We don’t work with the government,” Callaro told Ars before the apparent dock of last week. “We don’t clean it up. The charge I have for my team is that we will not make allegations about what’s going on. We’ll just say what our software gives us 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 claim. ‘