China’s top-secret space plane has launched a mysterious object into orbit just 600 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.
The US Space Force is monitoring the situation, but the purpose of the object ejected on May 24 is unknown.
A Harvard astrophysicist first spotted the object and speculated that it could be a subsatellite deployment, or a piece of hardware ejected before the spaceplane ends its mission and leaves orbit.
The spacecraft – named Shenlong after a spirit dragon from Chinese mythology – was launched last December and has since carried several objects into orbit, some sending strong signals over North America.
China’s top-secret space plane has launched a mysterious object into orbit just 600 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The US Space Force is monitoring the situation, but the purpose of the object ejected on May 24 is unknown
China is very secretive about the space plane, describing its purpose only as providing “technical support for the peaceful use of space.”
The device was launched a day after the US cleared the flight of its ‘spy plane’, which the US Space Force chief said was ‘no coincidence’.
“It’s probably not a coincidence that they’re trying to match us in terms of timing and sequencing of this,” said Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations for the Space Force.
And while the Chinese spaceplane has since fallen under the radar, the mysterious object is raising concerns.
Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, saw the object for the first time and shared his findings about X.
“This object could be a subsatellite deployment, or it could be a piece of hardware that was ejected and deorbited before the end of the mission (the spaceplane’s first flight did something similar),” McDowell told me.
“It will be interesting to see if the plane maneuvers or lands soon.”
The Chinese spaceplane is currently on its third mission and US officials have said its capabilities are somewhat comparable to those of the US X-37B (pictured), which launched on December 29, 2023.
Amateur astronomer Scott Tilley tracked the Chinese spaceplane in December as it ejected six objects, sending signals over North America.
Tilley said he believed the signals were aimed at a ground station or a boat near British Columbia, Canada, where he lives.
“When the spaceplane flies over me, it only sends out a certain trajectory that appears to favor a location south to southwest of me.
“That is, at higher passes above me there are no signals, but at ocean passes to my southwest all my observations of the object have occurred.”
Tilley is working with a group in Switzerland that specializes in optical-band space surveillance, and the partnership has been keeping a close eye on the plane since it was launched on December 15.
The Chinese spaceplane is currently on its third mission and US officials have said its capabilities are somewhat comparable to those of the US X-37B, which was launched on December 29, 2023.
The launch followed more than two weeks of false starts and delays attributed to bad weather and unspecified technical problems, forcing ground crews to roll the spacecraft back to its hangar.
It happened two weeks after the Chinese spaceplane made its third mission into orbit since 2020.
The American Boeing-built vehicle, about the size of a small bus and resembling a miniature space shuttle, is built to deploy various payloads and conduct technology experiments on years-long orbital flights.
The planned duration of the final X-37B mission has not been made public, but is likely to last until June 2026 or later, given the prevailing pattern of increasingly longer flights.