North Korea's first spy satellite is “alive”, a Dutch space expert said on Tuesday, after detecting changes in its orbit that suggest Pyongyang was successfully controlling the spacecraft, although its capabilities remain unknown. .
After two failures, North Korea successfully placed the Malligyong-1 satellite into orbit in November last year.
North Korean state media said he photographed sensitive military and political sites in South Korea, the United States and elsewhere, but did not release images. Independent radio trackers detected no signals from the satellite.
“But now we can definitively say that the satellite is alive,” wrote Marco Langbroek, a satellite expert at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, in a statement.
From February 19 to 24, the satellite carried out maneuvers to raise its perigee, or the lowest point of its orbit, from 488 km to 497 km, Langbroek highlighted, citing data from the Combined Space Operations Center, led by the United States.
“The maneuver proves that Malligyong-1 is not dead and that North Korea has control over the satellite – something that was disputed,” he explained.
The South Korean Ministry of Defense noted that it had also assessed that the satellite was in orbit, but that it would not comment further on individual analyses.
On Monday (26), Defense Minister Shin Won-sik declared that the satellite was showing no sign of carrying out other tasks or carrying out reconnaissance.
“Although we currently cannot be sure whether the satellite is capturing images successfully, it at least performs orbital maneuvers, so in that sense it is functional,” Langbroek wrote of Shin's comments.
The orbit raising maneuver was a surprise, as the presence of a propulsion system on board was unexpected and previous North Korean satellites had never performed maneuvers, the expert highlighted.
“Having the ability to raise the satellite’s orbit is a big deal,” Langbroek said.
This means that as long as there is fuel in the satellite, North Korea can extend the life of the device by raising its altitude when it becomes too low due to the decline in orbit, he concluded.
North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, has promised to launch three more spy satellites in 2024.
Source: CNN Brasil
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