It appears that China's Shenlong ("Divine Dragon") robotic spacecraft has successfully placed six objects into Earth orbit just four days after it was launched on its third mission.
After watching the objects intently for several days, amateur spacecraft trackers from all around the world have detected emissions emanating from some of the objects.
The six unexplained objects are known as OBJECT A, B, C, D, E, and F. Satellite tracker and amateur astronomer Scott Tilley says that OBJECT A appears to be sending out signals similar to what China's spacecraft has released from objects on earlier voyages.
"OBJECT A's or nearby emission is reminiscent of earlier Chinese space plane 'wingman' emissions in the sense the signal is modulated with a limited amount of data," Tilley told Space via email. "There is speculation that the emission from OBJECT A may be from an object close to it, but this is speculation not based on any evidence I'm aware of." Tilley has referred to the objects as "mysterious wingmen" on X (formerly Twitter).
OBJECT D and E, meanwhile, appear to be emitting idle "placeholder" signals with no data accompanying them. "It should be noted that unlike emissions early in the Chinese space plane missions 1 and 2, these emissions are very intermittent and do not stay on long," Tilley says. "It's taken days of observations tracking pass after pass with dish antennas to come up with this data."
