Wednesday, 3 August 2022

A stalker and its prey (Kosmos 2558 and USA 326)

 

In my previous post I discussed the newly launched Russian military satellite Kosmos 2558 (2022-089A), that was launched on August 1 into the orbital plane of the US military IMINT satellite USA 326 (2022-009A). There are indications that it is an 'inspector' satellite that is going to take a detailed look at USA 326.

Last night I observed them both, passing about half an hour after each other. Over the enxt 24 hrs Kosmos 2558 will approach USA 326, to a distance of ~75 km on August 4 ~14:47 UTC, if they do not manouvre in the mean time.

Above are framestacks from the captures (in the image with USA 326, a flaring Starlink, Starlink-1349, is also visible, in the lower left corner).

Below is the video footage. It was taken with a WATEC 902H2 Supreme with a Pentax 1.2/50 mm lens at 25 fps.

It will be interesting to follow this Cold war cat-and-mouse game above our heads over the coming days and weeks....


 

 



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