Eyes pointed towards the sky, where a mysterious spaceship experimental launched into orbit by Chinaafter six months of activity, appears to have released an object at an altitude of approximately 600 kilometers. The Shenlong, this is the name of the vehicle, would have expelled something last May 25, according to what was detected by the awareness teams of the space domain of the US Space Force. Waiting to find out more, the unidentified object, cataloged with the code 59884 and similar to an airplane, it has been orbiting the Earth for over ten days now.
The Chinese aircraft and object 59884
The entire story was reconstructed by the site South China Morning Postaccording to which the unknown object was ejected from Shenlong il May 25th without carrying out any type of particular maneuver. “It could just be an inert piece of hardware“, speculated Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and space activity tracker at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center. Canadian amateur astronomer Scott Tilley, the same one who helped NASA find one of its long-lost satellites, said that neither the object nor the Chinese plane issued new ones signals after release.
The Shenlong, on its third flight and taking off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert on December 14, 2023, is considered a kind of counterpart to the US military space plane X-37B. To date, very little information has been released on the size or capabilities of Beijing’s vehicle. We know, for example, that it made its first flight in 2020 and that, in August 2022, it carried out its second mission (which lasted nine months). During this activity Shenlong would expel and then retrieve a subsatellite to test various technologies. So could something similar have happened?
The Shenlong tests
After the third launch of Shenlong, in December, space activity detectors had detected the release, by the vehicle, of at least five objects in low Earth orbit, two of them presumed satellites (the most accredited hypothesis, given that they emitted radio signals similar to the airplane signals) or, presumably, rocket debris who had sent Shenlong into orbit.
We don’t know much about how Shenlong’s third mission progressed, other than that the spaceplane raised its orbit from about 300 to 600 kilometers in late January, where it has remained. Chinese space authorities have not revealed further details, nor said when it will return. “Reusable technology tests and space science experiments will be carried out to provide technical support for the peaceful use of space“, wrote the Chinese media. It cannot therefore be ruled out that object 59884 could serve precisely this purpose. The US is monitoring the situation.
Meanwhile the lunar probe Chang’e-6 highlighted the giant strides China has made in space exploration.
Launched into space on May 3 from the southern island province of Hainan, its mission was to land on the far side of the moon and collect samples that scientists believed would help humanity answer key questions about the early evolution of the solar system. Well, after several maneuvers, the Chinese landing module managed to land in a huge crater known as the South Pole-Aitken Basin.
