u/DiveLive

The most detailed write-up I have seen so far is from Katalyst: https://www.katalystspace.com/news/katalyst-concludes-link-mission-advances-future-robotic-space-operations. According to them, LINK had an anomaly during commissioning that affected its attitude control and sent it spinning about more than one axis, briefly cutting its communications. During it, an electrical power system fault left two of its three reaction wheels unavailable.

Ha, it is. The sad part is that LINK, the robot sent to save it, still got within 12 to 15 km of Swift, but a power fault early on had already ruled out the grab.

Yes, it's planned to come down around 2030. Those panels are being installed because NASA expected experiments and commercial modules to need more power up until then, and in case micrometeoroid hits wear down the older arrays. NASA also says they'll help power the controlled deorbit of the station when the time comes.

Fair point, and NASA actually looked into it (https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/iss-deorbit-analysis-summary.pdf). You're right that the delta-v isn't huge, but the station is so heavy that it would still need a lot of propellant and a tug that doesn't exist yet. On top of that, the risk of a debris impact is much higher at around 800 km. So these solar arrays are just to keep it powered until around 2030 and help with its deorbit.

Brakes for now. If it breaks, the headline changes 😂

Fair question: 5 km was one snapshot on the morning of 18 October, not the closest they got. Run through the public orbit data, the closest passes come out at a few hundred metres on 16 and 17 October, but that data is only good to about a kilometre, so all it can honestly say is "1 km or less". LeoLabs tracks both with its own radars and says Cosmos 2612 came within roughly 500 m, though it notes exact estimates are uncertain (https://www.satellitetoday.com/government-military/2026/10/19/russian-satellite-maneuvered-within-extreme-proximity-of-iceye-satellite-leolabs-reports/)

Probably, and one Russia cared about. Going by the public orbit data, all those manoeuvres add up to roughly 180 m/s of delta-v, about 120 of it the plane change in May. That's more than it would take to deorbit itself, so either it carries plenty of fuel or it isn't meant to last long. My guess is the second: a satellite built to test what it can do up close, not to serve for years.

They got along a bit too well for two days. Now they're giving each other some space 😄

Hi, things have changed since yesterday's post: Cosmos 2612 has raised its orbit and is moving away from ICEYE-X36. This is the update on the current situation.

Ha, no new physics. It can't on its own. Holding at 5 km would take a burn to match the periods, then regular small ones to cancel the different drag, which is what stationkeeping means.

Source: the public element sets on CelesTrak, which come from US Space Force tracking. The 07:38 UTC sets for both, then the newer 12:25 UTC set for Cosmos 2612 and 15:36 UTC set for ICEYE-X36, propagated with SGP4.

Ha, Kosmos 2251 and Iridium 33 definitely got as close as two satellites can 😄

Good catch, thanks. Those sets are newer than the 07:38 UTC ones I used, and they show the gap opening: about 9 km at 12:25 UTC and 12 km at 15:37 UTC. So it isn't holding at 5 km.

Public element sets, the ones CelesTrak publishes for both satellites, from 07:38 UTC on 18 October. At that moment they put Cosmos 2612 about 5 km behind ICEYE-X36 and about 150 m higher. LeoLabs' own tracking also had them about 5 km apart on the afternoon of 16 October.

Edit: I first wrote that the gap had held so far, but newer sets (12:25 and 15:36 UTC) show it opening: about 9 km at 12:25 and 12 km at 15:37 UTC, falling back roughly 20 km a day. So it isn't holding at 5 km.

Yes, they're incredibly close. You can follow the pair at https://orbinauts.com/?select=news:cosmos-2612-iceye-x36-2026-10 and it is hard to tell them apart. Not sure what the plan is there.

https://reddit.com/link/phjg43e/video/k1ptqyf1m9wh1/player

Right, Europe isn't counted as a country, though its ATV cargo ships did dock with the ISS. "Fourth" is ISRO's own count (https://www.isro.gov.in/Achievements\_Department\_of\_Space\_2025.html), and the page doesn't say which countries it counts. It's debatable, though: Japan docked two ETS-VII satellites with each other in 1998 (https://jaxa.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/21310/files/AC1100007.pdf) and China docked Shenzhou 8 with Tiangong-1 in 2011, so by that count India would probably be fifth.

Both have, as far as I can tell: Japan in 1998, when its two ETS-VII satellites docked with each other (https://jaxa.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/21310/files/AC1100007.pdf), and China in 2011, when Shenzhou 8 docked with the Tiangong-1 space lab (https://www.cmse.gov.cn/gygc/gcjj/). "Fourth" comes from ISRO's own official page (https://www.isro.gov.in/Achievements\_Department\_of\_Space\_2025.html), but it doesn't say which countries it counts. Going by those dates, after the US and the Soviet Union, India would more likely be fifth.

The article says the same: ISRO planned for them to work up to two years once undocked, and nothing raised their orbit after late April 2025. The "India" in the title is the point of the story: these are the satellites that made it the fourth country to dock in space, which is why their re-entry is news

Same here! Nozomi launched in 1998 but couldn't get into orbit around Mars in 2003 and flew past it. Since then JAXA has brought back samples from two asteroids, Itokawa with Hayabusa and Ryugu with Hayabusa2, so returning a sample isn't new to them.

Yes, MEGANE is NASA's gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, so it will measure which elements Phobos's surface is made of. NASA also built the P-Sampler, a pneumatic sample collector, and its ground stations will help track the probe. The rest is a team effort too: ESA supplied the Ka-band communication equipment and ground station support, France's CNES built the MIRS infrared spectrometer, and CNES and Germany's DLR built the rover MMX will release onto Phobos.

Yes, it's one of the big ones, and Google says so itself: it calls cooling a crucial research challenge for data centres in orbit.

In space there's no air to carry heat away, so the only way out is to radiate it as infrared from radiator panels. And nearly every watt the solar panels feed the chips ends up as heat the radiators have to get rid of. That takes a lot of radiator area, and they work best kept out of direct sunlight. The ISS already carries large radiators for the same reason.

Google's approach is heat pipes that carry the heat from the chips out to radiators. So far it has only tested that in a vacuum chamber on the ground, and this satellite is where it gets tried in space: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-research/google-project-suncatcher-facts/

The positions are to scale: the Earth's radius is 1,000 pixels, so each pixel is about 6.4 km, and everything is where it actually was at 16:17 UTC on 23 September.

The dots are the big cheat, though. Each one is about 14 km wide at that scale, while the smallest tracked debris is around 10 cm. At true size you wouldn't see a thing, not even the ISS, which would be less than a fiftieth of a pixel.

The licence's cover page. Revision 9.0, issued and effective 26 September 2026, signed by the FAA's Safety Authorization Division.

https://preview.redd.it/0qvswi63p0sh1.png?width=797&format=png&auto=webp&s=a1d98bf895cff7c2c40ff647c012e760300338ce

Cool, if you stumble on it again, drop it here. I'm always up for learning something new on this.

Ha, honestly not a bad idea. You don't even need telescopes for the bright ones: the ISS is easy to spot by eye when it passes over just after dusk or before dawn. On the map I linked above, press Locate and the "Over you next" list shows when each satellite next passes over you, soonest first, and which passes are visible. If I ever do a watch party, I'll post it here :-)

Where's the 30% from? I didn't see that figure in ESA's report, so I'd be curious to read it.

What the data does show: as of 23 September, all 11,110 Starlink satellites in the US catalogue fly below 600 km. ESA's report says constellations using low orbits like that are a big reason almost 90% of satellites now naturally meet the 25-year limit, coming down on their own even without a disposal burn.

Where the report puts the risk is elsewhere: of the risk from objects already in orbit, 96% is on inactive ones, the biggest share on spent rocket stages, and the risk clusters around 850 km. Full report: https://www.sdo.esoc.esa.int/environment_report/Space_Environment_Report_I10R1_20260908.pdf