So what do we know about the configuration of Kosmos 2612? Does it have tentacles or gripping arms or any of these things? Or is it completely unknown to us?
The USA has been working on several obviously ASAT demonstrations, under the auspices of things like benevolent reboosts. The Swift Observatory was approached by Katalyst's LINK satellite, cleverly designed to grapple it without any affordances for this, but unfortunately, LINK suffered from attitude control issues, and except for some notable proximity maneuvers, it was unable to grapple or reboost the observatory as planned.
At the same time, a rather ominous-looking quadpus of tentacles was on-board the ISS, demonstrating its grapple abilities to the astronauts there.
I believe that if Kosmos 2612 has grappling ability and it can get close enough to its quarry, we may see some interesting stuff. I will be watching this closely. Quite sad that this is an adversary making hostile moves on Ukraine, through a putatively USA-registered spacecraft, though. Dark days are upon us, for certain.
“ we are perhaps watching a first actual on-orbit ASAT attack”
So what do we know about the configuration of Kosmos 2612? Does it have tentacles or gripping arms or any of these things? Or is it completely unknown to us?
The USA has been working on several obviously ASAT demonstrations, under the auspices of things like benevolent reboosts. The Swift Observatory was approached by Katalyst's LINK satellite, cleverly designed to grapple it without any affordances for this, but unfortunately, LINK suffered from attitude control issues, and except for some notable proximity maneuvers, it was unable to grapple or reboost the observatory as planned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_boost_mission
At the same time, a rather ominous-looking quadpus of tentacles was on-board the ISS, demonstrating its grapple abilities to the astronauts there.
I believe that if Kosmos 2612 has grappling ability and it can get close enough to its quarry, we may see some interesting stuff. I will be watching this closely. Quite sad that this is an adversary making hostile moves on Ukraine, through a putatively USA-registered spacecraft, though. Dark days are upon us, for certain.