The X-37B, the US Area Drive’s secretive house aircraft, will quickly take flight once more.
On Monday, the Area Drive introduced that it’ll fly the small, Area Shuttle–formed automobile on this system’s eighth mission subsequent month. The launch of the automobile, on a Falcon 9 rocket, is scheduled to happen no sooner than August 21 from Kennedy Area Heart in Florida.
There are two lively X-37Bs within the Area Drive fleet, each constructed by Boeing. The primary made its debut flight in April 2010. Since then, the 2 uncrewed spacecraft have made a succession of longer flights. The primary made its longest and newest flight from 2020 to 2022 over a span of 908 days. The second flew extra lately, touchdown at Vandenberg Area Drive Base on March 7 after 434 days in orbit.
It’s seemingly that the primary of those two automobiles, each of that are about 29 toes (9 meters) lengthy and roughly one-quarter the size of one in every of NASA’s Area Shuttle orbiters, will launch subsequent month.
Some Particulars In regards to the Upcoming Flight
Over the previous decade and a half, the Area Drive has largely remained silent in regards to the function of this house aircraft, flying categorized payloads and offering solely restricted details about the aim of every flight.
Nonetheless, for this flight, OTV-8, the navy has supplied a bit extra element about its intentions. The automobile will fly with a service module that can increase its capability for experiments, permitting the house aircraft to host payload for the Air Drive Analysis Laboratory and the Protection Innovation Unit.
The mission’s targets embody exams of “high-bandwidth inter-satellite laser communications applied sciences.”
“OTV-8’s laser communications demonstration will mark an vital step within the US Area Drive’s skill to leverage industrial house networks as a part of proliferated, diversified, and redundant house architectures,” mentioned Common Probability Saltzman, US Area Drive chief of house operations, in an announcement. “In so doing, it is going to strengthen the resilience, reliability, adaptability, and information transport speeds of our satellite tv for pc communications architectures.”
Navigating in a World With out GPS
The house aircraft may even advance the event of a brand new navigation expertise primarily based on electromagnetic wave interference. The Area Drive information launch characterizes this because the “highest-performing quantum inertial sensor ever examined in house.”
Boeing has beforehand examined a quantum inertial measurement unit, which detects rotation and acceleration utilizing atom interferometry, on typical plane. Now, a sophisticated model of the expertise is being taken to house to reveal its viability. The purpose of the in-space check is to reveal exact positioning, navigation, and timing in an setting the place GPS companies will not be obtainable.
“Backside line: Testing this tech will likely be useful for navigation in contested environments the place GPS could also be degraded or denied,” Saltzman mentioned in a social media publish Monday, describing the flight.
Quantum inertial sensors may be used close to the moon, the place there isn’t a comparable GPS functionality, or for exploration additional into the photo voltaic system.
Notably, the small X-37B is again to launching on a medium-lift rocket with this new mission. Throughout its most up-to-date flight that resulted in March, the house aircraft launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket for the primary time. This allowed the X-37B to fly past low Earth orbit and attain an elliptical excessive Earth orbit.
This story initially appeared on Ars Technica.
