A Russian military satellite, called Luch-2, was detected approaching a geostationary satellite last month, a maneuver that follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, which was found to be eavesdropping on other countries’ satellites repeatedly since 2014.
Aldoria, a French start-up that tracks orbiting satellites using a network of ground-based telescopes, warned satellite operators in May 2024 that it had detected a “sudden close approach” by Russia’s Luch-2 to a satellite in geostationary orbit. The Luch-2 maneuver occurred on April 12, 2024, about 22,232 miles (35,780 kilometers) from Earth’s surface, the company said in statement.
Aldoria did not reveal what satellite Luch-2 may have spied or exactly how close it got to the object. The minimum distance between the two objects is 6.2 miles (10 kilometers), while today (June 3) they are about 12 to 30 miles (20 to 50 kilometers), Saloua Mutaufiq, Aldoria’s public relations manager, told Space .com in email.
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News of this close approach comes shortly after U.S. intelligence officials and the Pentagon accused Russia of trying to militarize space by placing a different military inspection satellite in the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite.
The Russian satellite Kosmos 2576 “is likely a counterspace weapon that is supposed to be able to attack other satellites in low Earth orbit,” US Ambassador Robert Wood said on May 20 during meeting of the UN Security Council. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov has denied the Pentagon’s claims of fake news.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Luch-2, also known as Olympus-2, started in secret in March 2024 and moved within 37 miles (60 kilometers) of another geostationary spacecraft in October of that year. By early December, it had left that position and was hovering near another satellite, according to autonomous monitoring by the Slingshot Aerospacea space data analytics firm focused on spaceflight safety.
In both cases, Slingshot did not identify the satellites, but representatives of the company said SpaceNews that the information could be useful to satellite operators concerned about security in space.
The recent Luch-2 maneuvers are not unprecedented when it comes to Russian spacecraft behavior. The satellite’s predecessor, Luch-1, was a notorious interloper found repeatedly close to other nations’ satellites, including in 2015 when it caused international concern after it was parked directly between two Intelsat satellites for five months, sometimes maneuvering to about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) from US spacecraft.
While Intelsat officials said at the time that the Russian satellite was not interfering with their satellite services, it was the first publicly documented incident of a commercial operator being approached by a foreign military satellite. SpaceNews reported. In 2018, France blamed Russia for using Luch-1 to try to intercept communications from one of the country’s satellites used for military purposes, calling it “not only hostile, but an act of espionage.”
Ann analysis by a US non-profit think tank found that Luch-1 had hopped between at least 19 different points around the geostationary belt by 2020. Similar maneuvers of Luch-1, which Russia launched in 2014, created “a heightened sense of vigilance in space community,” Aldoria said in last week’s news release.
“Luch-2, like its predecessor, has a history of unusual maneuvering near other satellites in geostationary orbit, which has also raised suspicions about its mission,” the company wrote.
