COSMOS 2589 (2025-131A, launched June 2025, classed as military in Jonathan McDowell’s GCAT catalogue) is drifting slowly west along the geostationary belt toward QZS-3 (Michibiki-3), one of the satellites in Japan’s QZSS navigation system.
Where: both are about 35,800 km above the equator at 127°E, almost exactly due south of Okinawa (over the Molucca Sea in eastern Indonesia). From Tokyo that spot is about 46° up in the southern sky.
Timeline, from public Space-Track element sets:
– 21–30 Sep: seven orbit changes in ten days, the last raising its orbit by 46 km with a small tilt change on 30 Sep
– 20 Oct: at 127.945°E, 0.025° of longitude (about 18 km east–west) from JCSAT 10 (JCSAT-3A), a Japanese communications satellite at 127.97°E
– Since then: drifting west away from JCSAT 10 and toward QZS-3, speeding up from 0.030° to 0.053° a day
– Distance to QZS-3: ~378 km on 31 Oct, ~345 km on 1 Nov
Forecast: closest approach about 22 km around 7 Nov, ~17:00 UTC. That comes from COSMOS 2589’s latest public element set (29 Oct), so it will shift as new data arrives. Its orbit is tilted slightly (0.28°), so the real distance swings north–south through each day.
Background: Russia has done this before in geostationary orbit. Its Luch/Olymp-K satellite spent about ten years parking next to Western communications satellites. It came within about 10 km of Intelsat 901 in 2015 and visited around 30 locations, and in 2018 France publicly accused it of eavesdropping on the French-Italian military satellite Athena-Fidus.
– https://aerospace.csis.org/luch
Why would a satellite do this? Public orbital data can’t say. The usual explanations are listening (sitting inside the radio beams sent up to another satellite), inspecting it up close, practising close approaches, or simply passing through on the way to a new slot. The tell will be whether COSMOS 2589 stops next to QZS-3 or drifts on past.
To avoid over-reading: China’s inspector satellite SJ-21 is also near 127°E, but its orbit is tilted 5.4°, so it swings thousands of km north and south each day and isn’t part of this.
What this shows and doesn’t: where the satellites are and how their orbits changed, not what COSMOS 2589 is doing or why. Some classified objects aren’t in the public catalogue at all.
Live distance, forecasts and history: https://overhead24.com/proximity/42917-64467
Disclosure: I built overhead24, a free site that screens public orbital data for approaches like this. I haven’t seen this reported anywhere yet and will post an update around the closest approach.
submitted by /u/AlmostSneakers
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Source: Reddit r/OSINT · 2026-11-01