If you have been paying attention to these two satellites over the last 3 or so years since they have been launched, you have noticed that yes, they were once pretty close together but separated as time went along.  Now they are almost at the same orbital position.  Looking as SATPC32,  you will see that 4A seems to be about 1 KM higher than 4B.  The slow drift over the years is probably due to a very small difference in release velocity from when they were separated from the launch vehicle.  They were launched in June of 2017 and seemed to have gotten close a few years back.  Over the next couple of months, they will slowly drift apart. 

From: Pedro Dutra Sousa via AMSAT-BB <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, January 4, 2021 4:19 PM
To: Bob Liddy (K8BL) <[email protected]>
Cc: Paul Stoetzer <[email protected]>; AMSAT <[email protected]>
Subject: [AMSAT-BB] Re: CAS-4A/B co-located?

Looks like a rendezvous.

73

Pedro CU2ZG 

Sent from my iPhone

On 4 Jan 2021, at 21:01, Bob Liddy (K8BL) <[email protected]> wrote:

There are suspicions that they were very active during the early

morning hours of November 4th.  ;o)        -BL

On Monday, January 4, 2021, 02:59:12 PM EST, Paul Stoetzer <[email protected]> wrote:

Possibly. I doubt we'll ever know exactly what Zhuhai-1 01A and
Zhuhai-1 01B are actually up to :)

https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/zhuhai-1_ovs-1.htm

73,

Paul. N8HM

On Mon, Jan 4, 2021 at 2:56 PM Zach Metzinger <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On 01/04/21 13:51, Paul Stoetzer wrote:
> > They were launched on the same mission and have stayed pretty close
> > together as I believe the two host satellites are identical, though
> > the distance does vary some.
>
> Hello Paul,
>
> Yeah, I figured they were part of the same launch, but I've never seen
> them orbiting so identically for a long period like this. Perhaps the
> host satellites have been re-tasked (moved) to this new configuration?
>
> --- Zach
> N0ZGO
>

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