A propaganda article from Chinese media: http://bbs.9ifly.cn/forum.php?mod=redirect&goto=findpost&ptid=10910&pid=259375&fromuid=24484
arm.2. CX-3 is indeed built by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Looks like two of the satellites deployed has just made a very close pass of each other half a day ago per NORAD tracking data - are we going to see the first ever use of a Chinese robotic arm grappling in space soon?From Robert Christy: http://www.zarya.info/blog/?p=1396
2. On Aug 10 one can see small but visible change in the orbit of B. Calculating directly from TLEs, from 98.055°, 667.7x672.3 km, to 98.058°, 668.0x672.0 km.
Some very interesting news: it seems that NORAD's "object C" (SY-7?) has made some very large orbital changes over the past 3 days - the orbit became 502 X 510 km X 98.05° (100 km decrease in altitude! ) on August 16 and now it's 565 X 610 X 97.7° (inclination decrease!) - apparently it is closing in with good old SJ-7 launched in 2005. Hmm?
Could it have something like a robotic arm on it & perhaps it's going to get hold of one of the targets.
Very interesting, seems to be similar in some ways to the SJ-12/SJ-06F rendezvous from 2010:http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1689/1Still seems to me to be much more indicative of on-orbit inspection than an ASAT weapons test. The maneuvers are occurring over a pretty long time period and the rate of closure is nothing like what you'd want for a kinetic kill.