China’s reusable space plane has become even more enigmatic. Shortly after its third mission, the Shenlong (“Divine Dragon”) robotic space plane appears to have deployed six objects into Earth’s orbit. Amateur spacecraft trackers worldwide have been closely monitoring these objects and have detected emissions emanating from some of them.

These six unidentified objects have been labeled as OBJECT A, B, C, D, E, and F. According to satellite tracker and amateur astronomer Scott Tilley, OBJECT A’s emissions bear resemblance to those emitted by objects released by China’s space plane during previous missions.

Tilley stated, “The emission from OBJECT A or its vicinity is similar to the emissions observed from earlier Chinese space plane ‘wingmen.’ The signal is modulated with a limited amount of data. Speculation suggests that the emission from OBJECT A may originate from a nearby object, although this is purely speculative and lacks supporting evidence.” Tilley has referred to these objects as “mysterious wingmen” on X (formerly Twitter).

On the other hand, OBJECT D and E seem to emit intermittent “placeholder” signals without any accompanying data. Tilley explains, “It is worth noting that unlike the emissions observed during the early stages of Chinese space plane missions 1 and 2, these emissions are sporadic and short-lived. It took several days of observing multiple passes with dish antennas to gather this data.”

Tilley and other satellite trackers have thoroughly analyzed the signals and are confident that the emissions originate either from the objects themselves or from their immediate vicinity. This conclusion is based on observing the objects along their anticipated paths in the sky, the absence of any other known objects within the trackers’ antenna range during data collection, and the unique modulation of these signals, which has only been observed in previous Chinese space plane missions using a frequency of 2280MHz, as Tilley explains.