PairWatch: Pair-Aware Anomaly Transformer for Detecting Adversarial Rendezvous in Public Satellite Catalogs

Abstract

Documented adversarial rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) appear in the public TLE catalog, yet existing TLE-based maneuver detectors treat each satellite in isolation - mistaking routine station-keeping for adversarial behavior and missing RPO entirely when the target stays passive. We argue that the right unit is the satellite pair and the right inductive bias is the kinematic symmetry between approach and recede. We instantiate both with PairWatch, a pair-aware AnomalyTransformer whose attention prior is augmented with a sign-symmetric geometric similarity over relative-motion features, and release an open benchmark of 359 windows from public Space-Track data spanning 11 documented RPO events, 100 Clohessy-Wiltshire synthetic adversarial windows, and a five-class hard-negative set culminating in the TerraSAR-X / TanDEM-X helix formation. Under the deployment-relevant criterion of a single threshold separating real RPO from operational negatives - a necessary property for catalog-scale screening - PairWatch is the only model that succeeds, with the property holding in 100% of bootstrap resamples versus 0-19.5% for three neural baselines and under 0.1% for four physics-informed detectors. A per-source analysis exposes a shortcut-learning failure mode of single-number AUROC: simpler baselines attain higher overall AUROC by shortcutting a synthetic-vs-formation contrast with no operational meaning; removing this single cell flips the test ranking entirely (LSTM-AD), and these baselines fail the security-relevant task the benchmark was built to measure.