India to deploy 'bodyguard satellites' to protect orbital assets

At the Indian DefSpace Symposium 2025 in May, CDS Gen Anil Chauhan had said, "We all know the capabilities of some of our adversaries, which are going by leaps and bounds today. They have created a special aerospace force, they have demonstrated on-orbit manoeuvres, we’ve also heard about some kind of videos of dog fighting in space. It is important that we can keep track of all these kinds of activities, because they form part of a risk mitigation strategy." Chauhan here is talking about shady and irresponsible proximity operations, where one satellite approaches a non-cooperative target in space, in a threatening manner. 

Apparently, one such space actor approached an Indian orbital asset in 2024, requiring a collision avoidance manoeuvre. ISRO tracks and analysis close approaches by other objects in space to ISRO's operational satellites. If there is an uncomfortably close 'conjunction', collision avoidance manoeuvres (CAMs) are executed to move the satellite out of the way. In 2024, ISRO executed six CAMs in low Earth orbit (LEO). It has now emerged that one of these was to avoid a deliberate threatening approach by an adversarial actor. The adversarial nation has not been revealed, but there are few countries with such capabilities that are hostile to India, and one of them is China. According to a report in Bloomberg, India plans to deploy 'Bodyguard Satellites' to safeguard its orbital assets. 

To protect its satellites in space, ISRO first requires space situational awareness, which is understanding what objects are there in space, what their capabilities are, and what they are doing. The scope extends to natural threats such as solar storms and asteroids as well. Towards this goal, ISRO is working closely with private startups such as Digantara to boost its SSA capabilities, and is expanding the capabilities of the NEtwork for space object TRacking and Analysis (NETRA) project, that uses a network of ground-based instruments such as planetary radar and passive radio receivers. ISRO is also accelerating the deployment of surveillance satellites to fill in gaps in current capabilities.