Secret Space Plane Lands After 674 Days In Orbit : October 21, 2014 | by Lisa Winter
The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle’s third mission (OTV-3) came to an end on October 17 when the unmanned craft landed safely and autonomously at Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California after 675 days in orbit. Altogether, the three missions have totaled 1367 days, and a fourth mission is expected to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida sometime in 2015. The project, headed by Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is classified. As such, no one really knows what OTV-3 has been doing up there for nearly 2 years.
The Air Force has been fairly vague about the mission. The spaceplane was said to be testing “advanced guidance, navigation and control, thermal protection systems, avionics, high temperature structures and seals, conformal reusable insulation, lightweight electromechanical flight systems, and autonomous orbital flight, reentry and landing.”
The Boeing X-37B is a modified version of the NASA’s X-37 design. The unmanned craft intended for low Earth orbit looks like a smaller version of the space shuttle at only 29-feet-long with a 15-foot wingspan. Like the space shuttle, it is launched vertically using Atlas V rockets, though it is able to land horizontally on a runway, like a plane. Solar panels charge the spaceplane’s lithium ion batteries once it has left Earth’s atmosphere. Though it was designed to remain in orbit for 270 days, it has far exceeded those expectations.
The Air Force claims that the objectives of the X-37B are to develop “reusable spacecraft technologies for America's future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth.” However, it doesn’t seem likely that it will be used to retrieve satellites. Its cargo area is rather small at about 7 feet by 4 feet, so it is not clear what it could be carrying or what its payload might have been during OTV-3.
Learn More :
http://www.iflscience.com/space/secret- ... days-orbit
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by eagle » Fri Oct 17, 2014 8:56 pm 
