Kosmos-2558 imaged from orbit

The most recent edition of the Center for Strategic & International Studies’ “Space Threat Assessment” report contains a fuzzy picture of the Russian satellite Kosmos-2558 (2022-089A/53323)
taken from space. The report can be downloaded here:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/space-threat-assessment-2024
(see p. 18)

Kosmos-2558 is the third in a series of satellites known by the military index 14F150 and is part of a project called Nivelir. It was built by NPO Lavochkin. 
Kosmos-2558 has been closely monitoring the US reconnaissance satellite USA 326 (2022-009A/51445) since its launch in August 2022. See, for instance, these posts by Marco Langbroek:
https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/search/label/USA%20326
Its two predecessors were Kosmos-2519 and Kosmos-2542, the latter of which had several distant encounters with USA 245.  

The picture of Kosmos-2558 is credited to HEO Robotics, a company that uses its HOLMES cameras as hosted payloads on microsatellites to obtain images of other objects in space. 
According to its website, it currently employs over 30 sensors in low Earth orbit.

Since the Earth is in the background, Kosmos-2558 must have been imaged from a satellite orbiting above it. This is also more or less the way it should look from the vantage point of USA 326, 
which orbits roughly 40 km above Kosmos-2558.

I earlier speculated that 14F150 may be seen in a PowerPoint presentation of NPO Lavochkin in 2012 as well as in a presentation given by an NPO Lavochkin representative at a military exhibition 
in Moscow in 2016. See one of my posts in the Nivelir thread on the NASA Spaceflight Forum:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50125.0
(Reply 4)
The satellite seen in those presentations uses NPO Lavochkin’s new Karat-200 platform and has some type of telescope mounted on the bus. In the 2012 presentation 
it is described as one of three proposed satellites for “studies of the Earth and near-Earth space”. 

The satellite seen in the image indeed seems to bear some resemblance to the one shown in those presentations. The black features on either side must be the solar panels and the white feature 
the satellite bus. There seems to be some type of payload pointing upwards from the bus, not unlike the telescope seen in the NPO Lavochkin drawings, but this, admittedly, may be a case 
of “wishful seeing”.  

According to its website, HEO Robotics partners with “commercial companies, governments and defense around the world”. So can any of those interested in obtaining images 
of classified satellites order them from HEO Robotics and place them online? Just wondering.    

Bart Hendrickx


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