This paper presents a detailed investigation of unsteady supersonic flows around a typical two-body configuration, which consists of a capsule and a canopy. The cases with different trailing distances between the capsule and canopy are simulated. The objective of this study is to examine the detailed effects of trailing distance on the flow fields and analyze the flow physics of the different flow modes around the parachute-like two-body model. The computational results show unsteady pulsating flow fields in the small trailing distance cases and are in reasonable agreement with the experimental data. As the trailing distance increases, this unsteady flow mode takes different forms along with the wake/shock and shock/shock interactions, and then gradually fades away and transits to oscillate mode, which is very different from the former. As the trailing distance keeps increasing, only the capsule wake/canopy shock interaction is present in the flow field around the two-body model, which reveals that the unsteady capsule shock/canopy shock interaction is a key mechanism for the pulsation mode. (C) 2017 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd.