The Russian Defense Ministry is currently receiving high-resolution images of the earth's surface using two aging Persona satellites, bmpd writes in LiveJournal, citing research by analyst Bart Hendrix, published in the American journal The Space Review.
The publication reports that both spacecraft, designed and manufactured by the Samara Rocket and Space Center (RSC) Progress, after overcoming serious problems during the initial tests in orbit, “function normally.” Meanwhile, “there is no guarantee that they will continue to work” until the readiness of the new generation Hrazdan satellites, which are being worked on in the same RCC.
According to Hendrix, for the period of time until Hrazdan is ready, the Ministry of Defense has decided to develop a simpler type of spy satellite (Run-up). The publication of the publication says that the probable experimental predecessor of the “Run-up” (EMKA / “Cosmos-2525”) – the project of the VNIIEM corporation – “reached the launch pad only 2.5 years after the start of development.”
Meanwhile, as Hendrix assures, the resolution offered by Runaway does not match that of Hrazdan. “To complicate matters further, Russia currently does not have satellites for obtaining radar images (neither civilian nor military) that can see through the cloud cover and conduct observations at night,” the analyst notes.
In his opinion, “Russia's current capabilities in the field of space reconnaissance are far inferior to those of the United States and China. In the worst case, the Russian Defense Ministry may even find itself dependent solely on lower-resolution images from Russian civilian remote sensing satellites until its new fleet of reconnaissance satellites is ready to be launched into orbit. ”
In January 2019, Dmitry Baranov, General Director of the Progress RCC, said that the Russian Earth remote sensing satellites Resurs-P No. 2 and No. 3, which are considered civilian versions of Persona, do not work due to electronics failure. “Firstly, the reason is technical, it has been generally established, but these things have not yet been legally formalized to the end, so this has not yet been brought into the media field. The reasons for the failures are, if we speak, so to speak, in general terms, in the failure of the electronic component base, “said the head of the enterprise.
