Great piece, Bart!
Thank you for the positive reactions to the article. It is mainly a summary of what I have written on this forum during the past months about Nivelir, Burevestnik and Numizmat, but also contains additional details on the history and structure of TsNIIKhM (in the article I used the easier-to-read transliteration CNIIHM) and on the institute's work on nanosatellites (under a theme called Naveska). I will wrote more about the nanosatellites here a bit later, although very little is known about them. By the way, for more on the Soviet-era ASAT project "IS" I can recommend this article by Asif Siddiqi, published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1997:https://faculty.fordham.edu/siddiqi/writings/p7_siddiqi_jbis_is_history_1997.pdfThe Soviet Union also worked on a number of other ASAT projects, which I covered in this article for "Space Chronicle "in 2016 ("Naryad and the Soviet anti-satellite fleet"):http://www.bis-space.com/belgium/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Naryad-V-and-the-Soviet-Anti-Satellite-Fleet.pdf
I am not sure about Persona being a "stop-gap" solution, but the replacement appears to be the Razdan satellite which is supposed to debut this year, although of course the launch might well have slipped.Not a lot is known about the Razdan satellite, apart from some material that came out 2-3 years ago. Patience is a virtue ..........
Quote from: Phillip Clark on 05/07/2019 02:13 pmI am not sure about Persona being a "stop-gap" solution, but the replacement appears to be the Razdan satellite which is supposed to debut this year, although of course the launch might well have slipped.Not a lot is known about the Razdan satellite, apart from some material that came out 2-3 years ago. Patience is a virtue .......... Thanks. Do we know at least what type of launcher has been allocated to them? The Persona’s used a Soyuz 2.1b.
Treasury Sanctions Russian Government Research Institution Connected to the Triton MalwareOctober 23, 2020Washington – Today, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated, pursuant to Section 224 of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), a Russian government research institution that is connected to the destructive Triton malware. The Triton malware — known also as TRISIS and HatMan in open source reporting — was designed specifically to target and manipulate industrial safety systems. Such systems provide for the safe emergency shutdown of industrial processes at critical infrastructure facilities in order to protect human life. The cyber actors behind the Triton malware have been referred to by the private cybersecurity industry as “the most dangerous threat activity publicly known.”“The Russian Government continues to engage in dangerous cyber activities aimed at the United States and our allies,” said Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin. “This Administration will continue to aggressively defend the critical infrastructure of the United States from anyone attempting to disrupt it.”In recent years, the Triton malware has been deployed against U.S. partners in the Middle East, and the hackers behind the malware have been reportedly scanning and probing U.S. facilities. The development and deployment of the Triton malware against our partners is particularly troubling given the Russian government’s involvement in malicious and dangerous cyber-enabled activities. Previous examples of Russia’s reckless activities in cyberspace include, but are not limited to: the NotPetya cyber-attack, the most destructive and costly cyber-attack in history; cyber intrusions against the U.S. energy grid to potentially enable future offensive operations; the targeting of international organizations such as the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the World Anti-Doping Agency; and the 2019 disruptive cyber-attack against the country of Georgia.Triton MalwareIn August 2017, a petrochemical facility in the Middle East was the target of a cyber-attack involving the Triton malware. This cyber-attack was supported by the State Research Center of the Russian Federation FGUP Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics (TsNIIKhM), a Russian government-controlled research institution that is responsible for building customized tools that enabled the attack.The Triton malware was designed to target a specific industrial control system (ICS) controller used in some critical infrastructure facilities to initiate immediate shutdown procedures in the event of an emergency. The malware was initially deployed through phishing that targeted the petrochemical facility. Once the malware gained a foothold, its operators attempted to manipulate the facility’s ICS controllers. During the attack, the facility automatically shut down after several of the ICS controllers entered into a failed safe state, preventing the malware’s full functionality from being deployed, and prompting an investigation that ultimately led to the discovery of the malware. Researchers who investigated the cyber-attack and the malware reported that Triton was designed to give the attackers complete control of infected systems and had the capability to cause significant physical damage and loss of life. In 2019, the attackers behind the Triton malware were also reported to be scanning and probing at least 20 electric utilities in the United States for vulnerabilities.TsNIIKhM is being designated pursuant to Section 224 of CAATSA for knowingly engaging in significant activities undermining cybersecurity against any person, including a democratic institution, or government on behalf of the Government of the Russian Federation.As a result of today’s designation, all property and interests in property of TsNIIKhM that are in or come within the possession of U.S. persons are blocked, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with them. Additionally, any entities 50 percent or more owned by one or more designated persons are also blocked. Moreover, non-U.S. persons who engage in certain transactions with TsNIIKhM may themselves be exposed to sanctions.View identifying information on the entity designated today.
The patent involves the use of electrostatically charged “finely dispersed particles” to destroy space debris with an opposite electrostatic charge. The authors explain how this technique could be used to deal with space junk in geostationary orbit, which after some time in space gets a negative electrostatic charge. The interceptor would eject a cloud of lithium-coated particles which would become positively charged through interactions with the surrounding plasma as well as solar and cosmic radiation. Even if the particles are not aimed at the target and, say, released in the opposite direction, they would still be attracted by the negatively charged target. This places less stringent design requirements on the interceptor’s orientation systems and reduces the number of particles that need to be released. The particles would spread over all surfaces of the target, not just the side facing the interceptor, and, according to the authors, would destroy it, sending the resulting debris particles “on other trajectories”. In other words, the net result of the interaction between the particles and the target would be the production of even more space debris. This would suggest that the research was not so much focused on cleaning up space debris, but on ASAT applications instead (which would also be more in line with CNIIHM’s background). One also wonders if the charged particles wouldn’t be more likely to affect on-board electronic systems rather than physically destroy the target, in which case this should be seen as non-destructive ASAT technology
Настоящий Договор заключен и исполняется в целях выполнения государственного оборонного заказа:– Контракт № 110/1-2017/1653-Г от 01.12.2017г. между ФГУП «ЦНИИХМ» и АО «ИСС»;– Контракт № 1605/19-ЕП-732/228/1904/8001 от 25.07.2019 г. между АО «ИСС» и АО «НПП «Геофизика-Космос».
The only dedicated Russian military nanosatellite launched so far is Kosmos-2548 (also known as ERA-1), which was placed into orbit together with three Gonets-M satellites in December 2020 and was announced as being designed to test new minitiature orientation and astronavigation systems. This may have been a product of CNIIHM, although the name ERA could also point to a connection with the ERA Military Innovation Technopolis, a military R&D center established near the Black Sea resort of Anapa in 2018. ERA has a division that works on cubesats, but that work does not seem to have begun in earnest until after the launch of that satellite.
Meanwhile, it seems that CNIIHM is now also beginning to play a role in Russia’s manned space program. This can be determined from a court case between CNIIHM and the Progress Rocket and Space Center (RKTs Progress) in which RKK Energiya acts a third party. The court case is still ongoing and so far only some preliminary documentation has been published. https://kad.arbitr.ru/Card/14a3c703-0dad-44e2-bf3b-d0d982e4e8a7What can be learned from this is that CNIIHM received some type of contract from RKTs Progress on January 22, 2020, with Progress in turn being a subcontractor to RKK Energiya. The contract number makes it possible to establish that the work is part of a contract awarded by Roscosmos to RKK Energiya on December 19, 2016 for “Proton-NEM”. This covers all the work needed to prepare the Science Power Module (NEM) for launch and place it into orbit with a Proton rocket. At the time, NEM was still planned to be attached to the Russian segment of the International Space Station, but it is now scheduled to become the first element of the new Russian space station called ROSS. It is now also likely to fly on an Angara-A5M rocket from Vostochnyy instead of a Proton from Baikonur. RKTs Progress has a dual role in the NEM project. It built a static test model of NEM’s pressurized section and may also build the hull of the flight-rated version (although that is not entirely clear). As is known from technical specifications for Proton-NEM, it is also responsible for what in Russian is called the “assembly and protection unit” (“sborochno-zashchitnyy blok” or SZB), which is a technical term for the combination of the payload fairing and the adapter that attaches it to the rocket’s upper stage. In June 2021, RKTs Progress issued a press release on tests of the SZB, including a picture of a separation test of one of its elements (see attachment 2).https://www.samspace.ru/news/press_relizy/15314/CNIIHM is presumably involved in the latter work, not the development of the module itself (which is covered by another contract between Roscosmos and RKK Energiya). The contract number includes the abbreviation TsBS (ЦБС), which may refer to the specific system that CNIIHM is responsible for, but it is not seen in space-related literature. Given its historical background in explosives and solid-fuel engines, CNIIHM may provide pyrotechnic charges needed to separate elements of the payload fairing, but that is entirely speculative.