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I am recovering after bringing home an Italian bug of some sort: Grazie mille, Italia.

For some reason, the topic of autonomous proximity operations keeps coming up (See my previous post on the BX-1 panic.) The Air Force is going to use 2 MiTEx satellites to inspect DSP-23, which crapped out this spring:

In a top secret operation, the U.S. Defense Dept. is conducting the first deep space inspection of a crippled U.S. military spacecraft. To do this, it is using sensors on two covert inspection satellites that have been prowling geosynchronous orbit for nearly three years. The failed satellite being examined is the $400 million U.S. Air Force/Northrop Grumman Defense Support Program DSP 23 missile warning satellite. It died in 2008 after being launched successfully from Cape Canaveral in November 2007 on the first operational Delta 4-Heavy booster. Since the U.S. is now demonstrating the ability to do such up close rendezvous and inspection of American spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, it means USAF now has at least a “call up capability” to do the same to non-U.S. spacecraft like those from Russia and China.

Ryan Caron, then-a research assistant for the space security project at the World Security Institute’s Center for Defense Information, had a nice article on MiTEx in the Space Review.

Update: I neglected to mention Brian Weeden’s excellent article, The ongoing saga of DSP Flight 23. His summary is, in my view, exactly right: