Russian satellite linked to nuclear weapons program is spinning out of control
A secret Russian satellite that US officials believe is linked to Russia's nuclear weapons program appears to be spinning uncontrollably in space, in a major blow for Moscow, according to American analysts.
The Cosmos 2553 satellite, which was launched by Russia weeks before invading Ukraine in 2022, has been tumbling in space for the past year, suggesting it may no longer be functioning, according to Doppler radar data from space-tracking firm LeoLabs and optical data from Slingshot Aerospace.
The Cosmos was at the center of allegations from the US that Russia was developing a nuclear weapon capable of destroying entire satellite networks in space, including SpaceX's Starlink system that Ukrainian troops have relied on to fight Moscow's invasion.
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The US has accused Russia of launching secret satellites aimed at building a nuclear weapon capable of eliminating entire satellite systems in space.
REUTERS
LeoLabs, which detected errant movements from the satellite last year, now has 'high confidence' that the Cosmos is spinning out of control, Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at the company, told Reuters.
The satellite was notably flying in a relatively isolated orbit some 1,200 miles above the Earth in a known hotspot of cosmic radiation that normal satellites typically avoid.
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The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, said the findings from LeoLabs show clear evidence that the Russian satellite 'is no longer operational.'
Slingshot, however, said that the Cosmos appears to have recently stabilized after the company first detected the tumbling pattern last May.
Satellites have become key to Russia, America and China's space programs for military and intelligence operations.
dimazel – stock.adobe.com
Russia's Ministry of Defense, which denied allegations that Cosmos was linked to its nuclear weapons program, has yet to comment on the findings from the American analysts.
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US Space Command, which condemned the launch of Russia's military satellites, has also remained silent on the findings.
Although not a weapon itself, Cosmos 2553 was believed to aid Russia's development of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon.
The Cosmos is one of dozens of Russia's military satellites, with Moscow investing billions in strengthening its space capabilities for military and intelligence purposes as the war with Ukraine continues.
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Washington and Beijing have also followed suit to bolster their own secretive satellite programs, raising concerns about a future where space conflicts and satellite attacks become the norm.
The Biden administration warned last year that the Cosmos was just the start of Moscow's ambitions, with Russia allegedly 'considering the incorporation of nuclear weapons into its counterspace programs.'
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Kauffman argues that biological evolution is thus constantly creating not just new types of organisms but new possibilities for organisms, ones that not only did not exist at an earlier stage of evolution but could not possibly have existed. From the soup of single-celled organisms that constituted life on Earth 3 billion years ago, no elephant could have suddenly emerged—this required a whole host of preceding, contingent but specific innovations. However, there is no theoretical limit to the number of uses an object has. This means that the appearance of new functions in evolution can't be predicted—and yet some new functions can dictate the very rules of how the system evolves subsequently. 'The biosphere is creating its own possibilities,' Kauffman said. 'Not only do we not know what will happen, we don't even know what can happen.' Photosynthesis was such a profound development; so were eukaryotes, nervous systems and language. 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Davies and his co-workers have recently suggested that evolution in an expanding accessible phase space might be formally equivalent to the 'incompleteness theorems' devised by the mathematician Kurt Gödel. Gödel showed that any system of axioms in mathematics permits the formulation of statements that can't be shown to be true or false. We can only decide such statements by adding new axioms. Davies and colleagues say that, as with Gödel's theorem, the key factor that makes biological evolution open-ended and prevents us from being able to express it in a self-contained and all-encompassing phase space is that it is self-referential: The appearance of new actors in the space feeds back on those already there to create new possibilities for action. This isn't the case for physical systems, which, even if they have, say, millions of stars in a galaxy, are not self-referential. 'An increase in complexity provides the future potential to find new strategies unavailable to simpler organisms,' said Marcus Heisler, a plant developmental biologist at the University of Sydney and co-author of the incompleteness paper. This connection between biological evolution and the issue of noncomputability, Davies said, 'goes right to the heart of what makes life so magical.' Is biology special, then, among evolutionary processes in having an open-endedness generated by self-reference? Hazen thinks that in fact once complex cognition is added to the mix—once the components of the system can reason, choose, and run experiments 'in their heads'—the potential for macro-micro feedback and open-ended growth is even greater. 'Technological applications take us way beyond Darwinism,' he said. A watch gets made faster if the watchmaker is not blind. 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Humans attained planetary dominance so rapidly (for better or worse) that the question of when it will happen again becomes moot. Illustration: Irene Pérez for Quanta Magazine But what about the chances of such a jump happening in the first place? If the new 'law of increasing functional information' is right, it looks as though life, once it exists, is bound to get more complex by leaps and bounds. It doesn't have to rely on some highly improbable chance event. What's more, such an increase in complexity seems to imply the appearance of new causal laws in nature that, while not incompatible with the fundamental laws of physics governing the smallest component parts, effectively take over from them in determining what happens next. Arguably we see this already in biology: Galileo's (apocryphal) experiment of dropping two masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa no longer has predictive power when the masses are not cannonballs but living birds. Together with the chemist Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow, Sara Walker of Arizona State University has devised an alternative set of ideas to describe how complexity arises, called assembly theory. In place of functional information, assembly theory relies on a number called the assembly index, which measures the minimum number of steps required to make an object from its constituent ingredients. 'Laws for living systems must be somewhat different than what we have in physics now,' Walker said, 'but that does not mean that there are no laws.' But she doubts that the putative law of functional information can be rigorously tested in the lab. 'I am not sure how one could say [the theory] is right or wrong, since there is no way to test it objectively,' she said. 'What would the experiment look for? How would it be controlled? I would love to see an example, but I remain skeptical until some metrology is done in this area.' Hazen acknowledges that, for most physical objects, it is impossible to calculate functional information even in principle. Even for a single living cell, he admits, there's no way of quantifying it. But he argues that this is not a sticking point, because we can still understand it conceptually and get an approximate quantitative sense of it. Similarly, we can't calculate the exact dynamics of the asteroid belt because the gravitational problem is too complicated—but we can still describe it approximately enough to navigate spacecraft through it. Wong sees a potential application of their ideas in astrobiology. One of the curious aspects of living organisms on Earth is that they tend to make a far smaller subset of organic molecules than they could make given the basic ingredients. That's because natural selection has picked out some favored compounds. There's much more glucose in living cells, for example, than you'd expect if molecules were simply being made either randomly or according to their thermodynamic stability. So one potential signature of lifelike entities on other worlds might be similar signs of selection outside what chemical thermodynamics or kinetics alone would generate. (Assembly theory similarly predicts complexity-based biosignatures.) There might be other ways of putting the ideas to the test. Wong said there is more work still to be done on mineral evolution, and they hope to look at nucleosynthesis and computational 'artificial life.' Hazen also sees possible applications in oncology, soil science and language evolution. For example, the evolutionary biologist Frédéric Thomas of the University of Montpellier in France and colleagues have argued that the selective principles governing the way cancer cells change over time in tumors are not like those of Darwinian evolution, in which the selection criterion is fitness, but more closely resemble the idea of selection for function from Hazen and colleagues. Hazen's team has been fielding queries from researchers ranging from economists to neuroscientists, who are keen to see if the approach can help. 'People are approaching us because they are desperate to find a model to explain their system,' Hazen said. But whether or not functional information turns out to be the right tool for thinking about these questions, many researchers seem to be converging on similar questions about complexity, information, evolution (both biological and cosmic), function and purpose, and the directionality of time. It's hard not to suspect that something big is afoot. 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