Victus Haze is a US Space Force exercise in rendezvous and proximity operations: getting one satellite up close to another, quickly. It has two players about 500 km up in the same sun-synchronous orbit. Jackal, built by True Anomaly, launched on 3 May. Puma, built by Rocket Lab, launched on 19 June on an Electron with under 17 hours' notice.
My tracker logs orbit changes and close approaches from Space-Track's public orbit data. On 22 and 23 October it logged three small burns by Jackal. Since then the distance between the two at each daily check has gone 189 km, 83, 54, 69, 47.
The clearer sign is speed. The tracker forecasts each close pass and re-runs the forecast with every orbit update. On 23 October it predicted passes of about 2 km at 11 to 14 metres a second. By 24 October that had slowed to 7.6 m/s, by 26 October to 3.5 m/s. The latest forecast puts the next close point at 12:41 UTC on 27 October, about 2.3 km apart at 3.4 m/s, roughly jogging pace. Two satellites matching speeds like that is what a rendezvous looks like from the outside.
The log also shows bursts of large orbit changes by Puma in late July and at the end of August. Public reporting describes a July sortie and a later one in which Puma manoeuvred to evade, though the Space Force hasn't confirmed the second.
Caveats: public orbit data updates a few times a day and is good to about a kilometre at this height. Anything closer than that, or a burn between updates, won't show. The pair's page has the full forecast history: https://overhead24.com/proximity/69012-69646
submitted by /u/AlmostSneakers[link] [comments]