China’s secret space plane emits strong signal to the ground when passing North America: satellite tracker

China’s space plane could be sending signals to a hidden ground station or a ship near North America’s west coast, said an amateur astronomer who has been tracking the craft since it entered Earth’s orbit last week.

Strong emissions were detected at the frequency of 2280 megahertz while the uncrewed reusable plane was flying over British Columbia, Canada, where Scott Tilley is based, he told the South China Morning Post in an email on Tuesday.

“I’m seeing a pattern in its radio emissions while over me and it appears to favour low-elevation western passes,” said Tilley, who helped Nasa find its long-lost IMAGE satellite in 2018.

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“This could indicate a clandestine ground station on the west coast of North America or on a ship off the coast,” he said while emphasising that he was speculating.

The secretive Chinese plane, which is seen as a counterpart of the US military space plane X-37B, has been followed closely by satellite trackers around the world since it took off from the Gobi Desert last Thursday.

According to Tilley and a team in Switzerland that specialises in optical-band space surveillance, the launch on Thursday resulted in at least six objects now flying in low Earth orbit.

That included the space plane itself, Tilley said, which he designated object A and appeared to be very bright with a stable attitude control.

There was likely to be a pair of satellites (objects D and E) that were released by the plane and gave off radio signals similar to object A, “but without any form of data, just idle filler”, he said.

Tilley said that while the purpose of the satellite duo remained unknown, one possibility was that they could be used to “test rendezvous and retrieval operations”.

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There was also debris belonging to the Long March 2F rocket that lifted the space plane into orbit.

Among them, object B was “very bright” and its light curve pointed to a rocket upper stage, the European team wrote on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Objects C and F also seemed to be rocket debris because they were tumbling and dim, Tilley said.

It is the Chinese plane’s third mission following a two-day maiden flight in 2020 and a second flight which lasted nine months. The plane reportedly released mysterious objects during both previous missions.

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There have been no official images or details of the plane. It is not known how long the current mission will last.

Meanwhile, the Boeing-built X-37B, which has also been shrouded in mystery since its debut flight in 2010 because of its military nature, is waiting to lift off on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on December 28.

South China Morning Post