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14F137 Persona / Kvarts

Reconnaissance satellites "Persona" have been developed in the first half of the 2000s, and the first such spacecraft was put into orbit in 2008. In total three "Persons" spacecraft were launched, of which two were operational as of mid-2016. Among other things, they are used for intelligence support for Syrian campaign. According to unconfirmed reports, the satellites of the "Person" are able to take pictures with a resolution of 30 centimeters. Weight of one unit of seven tons, and the term of active existence - seven years. "Persona" are located on a circular sun-synchronous orbit at an inclination of 98 degrees at an altitude of 750 kilometers.

The project of the military satellite of optico-electronic reconnaissance "Persona" (product 14F137), developed in JSC "RCC-Progress" (Samara), won the competition of the Ministry of Defense in 2000. The device is based on the civil satellite of Earth remote sensing "Resurs-DK". It is intended for obtaining high-resolution images and their prompt transmission to Earth via radio.

In 2008-2015, the military launched three such vehicles, but to date, only two of them functioned. The first was lost in 2008 a few months after the launch as a result of the failure of electronic components. The second and third vehicles (launched in June 2013 and June 2015) operate in normal mode and were actively involved in the operation of the Russian armed forces in Syria.

They provide the General Staff Russian Armed Forces operative images with detailed resolution. The military claimed that the need of the armed forces in a significant capacity optical reconnaissance satellites orbital grouping is particularly apparent during the Syrian campaign.

The acquisition of images from space vehicles since the mid-1990s was one of the weak points of the space forces: Soviet satellites such as the Niemen operated in orbit for not more than a year and a half, while the warranty period for the American Crystal and Improved Crystal was ten years. After the last "Neman" was removed from the orbit in 2001, the military had to rely only on Cobalt-type photo reconnaissance satellites, the captured films from which were returned to the ground in special capsules landing on parachutes in the Orenburg region - on the prompt receipt of information simply was not possible.

The first "Persona" had to be in orbit in 2003, but due to the need for additional testing dates are constantly shifted - as a result of a break in the use of the Russian Defense Ministry optical reconnaissance vehicles was almost ten years. The launch of the first "Persona" satellite was later planned for 2005, but due to a delay in ground tests, its launch took place only in July 2008. The cost of creating the first device was estimated at 5 billion rubles. The mass of the satellite is more than seven tons, the orbit height is about 750 km. The warranty period of active work is seven years.

The first Persona satellite was launched in July 2008; it reportedly malfunctioned in February 2009 due to an electronics failure.

The second was not launched until June 2013. "Persona" N2 was launched using a rocket carrier "Soyuz 2.1b" from the 43rd site of the Plesetsk cosmodrome on June 7, 2013. The removal of the apparatus to a circular solar-synchronous orbit with an inclination of 98 ° and a height of about 719 km was successful. Supervising the creation of the satellite of the deputy head of the Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) Anatoly Shilov said that the launch of "Person" cost 10 billion rubles.

The second "Person" type encountered problems during the flight design tests. First the satellite performed the assigned tasks quite successfully: to debug the on-board systems and adjust the permissions, the first stage of the tests was conducted over the territory without sharp changes in the relief. But in November 2013, there were unexpected failures in the software of the on-board computer: less than twelve of the 24 memory cells of the high-speed radio link operated. This significantly affected the capabilities and functionality of the "Person". The military and representatives of the space industry unsuccessfully tried to restart the program. By August 2014 the problems with the software of the second "Persons" were resolved. According to "Kommersant", one of the youngest full-time programmers of "RCC-Progress" managed to restart the program almost single-handedly.

Due to the availability of only three Sapfir-V imaging payloads, Persona will after the third mission be replaced by the new developed Razdan series of imaging satellites.

Personas that have exceeded the warranty period seem to be working - such a conclusion can be drawn from the data on the regular correction of their orbits, which are monitored by the US military. The exact parameters of the Russian military satellites are not published in the open press, but, according to Hendrix, the resolution of "Person" is about 50 centimeters per pixel. For comparison: the resolution of the best American spy satellite Keyhole-11 (12) is estimated at about 5 centimeters per pixel, that is, an order of magnitude higher than that of the Russian Persons. "Persons" are rather comparable not with modern American space reconnaissance, but with the capabilities of the commercial company Maxar.

“As far as I know, Russia currently has two Persona military optical reconnaissance satellites in orbit. They were launched in 2013-2015. We don’t know exactly what the period of active work laid down by their manufacturer is probably 5-7 years. Quite probably, they have already exceeded this deadline and may fail at any moment. Russia also has no good civilian satellites for remote sensing of the Earth (ERS) in orbit either. The last of the Resurs-P satellites, the civilian version of Persona, failed in December 2021, even the general director of the RCC Progress admitted this . The next such satellites will be launched no earlier than 2023. In principle, Russia is already practically blind in orbit, " Bart Hendrix, independent analyst in the field of Soviet and Russian space programs, said 08 April 2022.

Russia is seriously lagging behind in the number of satellites. “The Americans have at least five Keyhole-12 satellites, the Italians, the French and the Spaniards have their own satellites, there are an order of magnitude more,” says Hendrix.

Are "Persons" able to follow the military conflict in Ukraine in real time? According to Hendrix, each of the two satellites has time to fly over the territory of Ukraine 2-3 times a day in the morning, while covering, according to unofficial data, a strip of 730 kilometers to the right and left of the point directly below the satellite. Moreover, the farther from this point the object you want to take a picture of, the worse its quality will be. This is the so-called swath, the territory that the device is able to cover during one flight in orbit by moving the camera. But in reality, the width of the frame that makes the satellite (shooting strip) is much narrower, for civilian "Resurs-P" it is32 kilometers, taking into account the amendment for permission, for Persons it can be about half as much (the exact data was not published in the public domain). In order to track the movement of one military object during the day, this is not enough, especially given the restrictions imposed by the weather.

Another problem is data processing. According to Pavel Podviga , a senior fellow at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva , the ability of a country to effectively use satellite intelligence is not determined by the number of satellites and their characteristics alone: "because even the Americans do not always cope with this task. I don’t see any evidence that Russia is successfully solving this problem in the war with Ukraine,” says Podvig.