“Blinding” of an American satellite over Crimea at the end of November — expert opinions

CrimeaPRESS reports:

Event notes sourcecaused a wide resonance, but the analysis of what happened leads to ambiguous conclusions.

What happened?

On November 28, the Naval News resource published material alleging that a reconnaissance satellite over Crimea could supposedly be “blinded” by radiation from an unknown device.

According to Western analyst HI Sutton and researcher Damien Symon, we are talking about the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 SAR satellite, one of the elements of the Copernicus system for observing ground objects.

Severe interference was detected in images taken by this satellite at 06:49 on November 23. The next day at 18:36, the interference became even more noticeable, effectively blocking the satellite’s view and ability to conduct reconnaissance.

The authors of the material also noted a malfunction of the automatic identification system (AIS) near Crimea: some civilian ships, which clearly should have been in the Sevastopol harbor, were transmitting a signal from the international airport.

According to foreign analysts, the failures could be associated with the operation of an unidentified radio-electronic complex for space purposes, the inclusion of which can affect the signal of navigation systems and disrupt the operation of synthetic aperture radars.

What is SAR?

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites are used to image the Earth’s surface at any time of day, in all weather conditions and through clouds.

Such satellites direct radar waves to the Earth’s surface and record the reflected signal, which makes it possible to conduct reconnaissance of objects on the surface and monitor changes in terrain, including military installations.

SAR satellite data has a high spatial resolution, which makes it valuable primarily for military applications.

What’s strange about this story?

In April of this year, a similar case became known from the materials of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Analysts from the United States have concluded that the Sentinel-1B spacecraft recorded “sudden interference” during one of its surveys of the Earth’s surface. A year later, the European Space Agency stopped operating this satellite, allegedly due to irreversible failure of the radar antenna power supply.

Later, analyzing the combat operations and the work of Russian electronic warfare systems in Ukraine, American analysts came to the conclusion that Russia does not have serious anti-satellite electronic weapons.

Some time after the publication of the CSIS report on modern methods of anti-satellite electronic warfare and Russia’s hypothetical lack of breakthrough solutions in this area, a senior fellow at the American think tank the Hudson Institute, Brian Clark, said that the Russian army had deployed hundreds of small electronic warfare groups equipped with R systems along the front line. -330Zh «Zhitel» and other weapons capable of disrupting the operation of satellites and weapons using GPS technology.

What can be concluded?

From the data published by Naval News, it follows that electronic warfare systems in certain areas of Sevastopol were covered by jamming fields. In this context, most likely, we are talking about the use not of anti-satellite systems (in this case, a significant part of the satellites over Crimea would encounter operational failures), but of standard electronic warfare systems that provide cover from AN/SPY-2 radars for RQ-4 drones and other NATO radar reconnaissance systems operating in the centimeter wave range. This circumstance suggests that the structure of the systems for protecting military and civilian facilities in Crimea, especially in light of the transfer of long-range ATACMS, Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles to the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the hypothetical transfer of German TAURUS missiles, has been revised and strengthened.

source: aggregator of military analytics and news UKRUS

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