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The X-37B, the US Area Pressure’s secretive area airplane, will quickly take flight once more.
On Monday, the Area Pressure 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 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 lately, touchdown at Vandenberg Area Pressure 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 ft (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 Concerning the Upcoming Flight
Over the previous decade and a half, the Area Pressure has largely remained silent in regards to the goal 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 army has supplied a bit extra element about its intentions. The automobile will fly with a service module that may broaden 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 targets embody checks of “high-bandwidth inter-satellite laser communications applied sciences.”
“OTV-8’s laser communications demonstration will mark an essential step within the US Area Pressure’s capacity to leverage industrial area networks as a part of proliferated, diversified, and redundant area architectures,” mentioned Common Probability Saltzman, US Area Pressure chief of area operations, in a press release. “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 also advance the event of a brand new navigation expertise based mostly on electromagnetic wave interference. The Area 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 atmosphere the place GPS companies will not be obtainable.
“Backside line: Testing this tech shall 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 is also used close to the moon, the place there is no such thing as 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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