2023-12-19 16:31:50
All about China
Just four days after being surprise launched on its third mission, China’s robotic space plane, called Shenron (“Divine Dragon”), appears to have placed six objects in Earth’s orbit.
Amateur spacecraft trackers around the world are monitoring these materials (designated OBJECT A, B, C, D, E, and F) and have recorded emissions coming from some of them.
According to satellite tracker and amateur astronomer Scott Tilley of Canada, the signals emitted by OBJECT A resemble those emitted by objects released by the Chinese space plane on previous missions.
China’s Shenlong space plane, shortly before being launched, on December 14, 2023. Credit: Reproduction social networks
“The emission from or nearby OBJECT A is reminiscent of previous Chinese space plane ‘wingman’ emissions in that the signal is modulated with a limited amount of data,” Tilley told the website Space.com. On X (formerly Twitter), he refers to the objects as “mystery wards” on X (formerly Twitter).
We have confirmation of S-band signals from the 3rd Chinese ‘spaceplane’ mission.
However, this time the ‘mysterious wingman’ emitter is only sending signals intermittently but it is fading deeply like earlier missions. ????⬇️ pic.twitter.com/lD2YtQYaFw
— Scott Tilley ???????? (@coastal8049) December 17, 2023
Objects D and E, in turn, appear to be emitting idle “placeholder” signals with no data to accompany them. “It should be noted that, unlike the emissions at the beginning of Chinese spaceplane missions 1 and 2, these emissions are very intermittent and do not remain for very long,” says Tilley. “It took days of observations tracking pass after pass with satellite dishes to arrive at this data.”
Read more:
It’s not the first time China’s space plane has released objects into orbit
After analyzing the signals, amateur trackers are confident that the emissions are coming from or near the objects. This conclusion is based on observation along their expected paths across the sky, the fact that no other known objects were in the beam of the trackers’ antennas when the data was collected, and the fact that the particular modulation of these signals is “unique and it has only been seen from previous Chinese spaceplane missions using a frequency of 2280MHz,” according to Tilley.
China’s space plane has exhibited similar behaviors in the past. On its two previous missions – launched in September 2020 and August 2022, respectively – the spacecraft was seen releasing a small, unknown object into orbit.
It is speculated that the objects could be service modules, test articles to practice placing payloads into orbit, or perhaps even small satellites used to monitor the space plane.
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