I don’t have context but if that’s real they are most certainly next to each other intentionally. Being miles away from each other with velocities hundreds of miles an hour different is considered an extremely close call.
Those are the Van Allen Probes A and B, and that is just a render, not a photo. [0]. There are two of them that flew in an identical orbit, but with one following the other at a distance, because a single probe would not be able to detect the difference between a transient EM field locally vs. a moving event along the orbit, but two craft spread apart but following the same path could.
