The X-37B, the US House Pressure’s secretive area airplane, will quickly take flight once more.
On Monday, the House Pressure introduced that it’ll fly the small, House Shuttle–formed car on this system’s eighth mission subsequent month. The launch of the car, on a Falcon 9 rocket, is scheduled to happen no sooner than August 21 from Kennedy House Middle in Florida.
There are two lively X-37Bs within the House Pressure 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 just lately, touchdown at Vandenberg House Pressure Base on March 7 after 434 days in orbit.
It’s seemingly that the primary of those two autos, each of that are about 29 ft (9 meters) lengthy and roughly one-quarter the size of one in all NASA’s House Shuttle orbiters, will launch subsequent month.
Some Particulars Concerning the Upcoming Flight
Over the previous decade and a half, the House Pressure has largely remained silent concerning the objective of this area airplane, flying labeled payloads and offering solely restricted details about the aim of every flight.
Nevertheless, for this flight, OTV-8, the navy has offered a bit extra element about its intentions. The car will fly with a service module that can develop its capability for experiments, permitting the area airplane to host payload for the Air Pressure Analysis Laboratory and the Protection Innovation Unit.
The mission’s objectives embrace exams of “high-bandwidth inter-satellite laser communications applied sciences.”
“OTV-8’s laser communications demonstration will mark an essential step within the US House Pressure’s capacity to leverage industrial area networks as a part of proliferated, diversified, and redundant area architectures,” mentioned Normal Probability Saltzman, US House Pressure chief of area operations, in an announcement. “In so doing, it should 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 area airplane may even advance the event of a brand new navigation expertise primarily based on electromagnetic wave interference. The House Pressure information launch characterizes this because the “highest-performing quantum inertial sensor ever examined in area.”
Boeing has beforehand examined a quantum inertial measurement unit, which detects rotation and acceleration utilizing atom interferometry, on standard plane. Now, a sophisticated model of the expertise is being taken to area to exhibit its viability. The objective of the in-space check is to exhibit exact positioning, navigation, and timing in an surroundings the place GPS companies should not out there.
“Backside line: Testing this tech can be useful for navigation in contested environments the place GPS could also be degraded or denied,” Saltzman mentioned in a social media put up Monday, describing the flight.
Quantum inertial sensors is also 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 area airplane 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.
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