NASA mission to use secret Air Force space plane

On Wednesday NASA is set to launch the X-37B spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, on a mission to gather data on how materials endure space. 

|
US Air Force via NASA
This April 5, 2010 photo made available by the U.S. Air Force via NASA shows the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle at the Astrotech facility in Titusville, Fla. Half of the Atlas V five-meter fairing is in the background.

The United States Air Force's robotic X-37B space plane will carry a NASA experiment to orbit when it launches on its next mystery mission Wednesday (May 20).

The NASA payload, called the Materials Exposure and Technology Innovation in Space (METIS) investigation, aims to test how the space environment affects certain materials. The experiment is packed aboard the unmanned X-37B spacecraft, which is scheduled to blast off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on Wednesday at 10:45 a.m. EDT (1445 GMT) from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

"By exposing materials to space and returning the samples to Earth, we gain valuable data about how the materials hold up in the environment in which they will have to operate," said METIS principal investigator Miria Finckenor, a materials engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. [See photos of the X-37B's fourth mission]

"Spacecraft designers can use this information to choose the best material for specific applications, such as thermal protection or antennas or any other space hardware," Finckenor added.

METIS will use some of the same materials as those placed on the International Space Station for the Materials on International Space Station Experiment (MISSE), which operated between 2001 and 2013 and flew more than 4,000 samples into space. Part of the goal is to look for more environmentally friendly materials that can be used in space, researchers said.

"When we flew newly developed static-dissipative coatings on MISSE-2, we did not know they would be used for both the Curiosity rover and the SpaceX Dragon,"  Finckenor said in the same statement. (MISSE included several sets of experiments, and MISSE-2 was the second one.) "Some program we don't know about now will be successful because engineers found the data they needed" on this experiment.

The reusable X-37B, which takes off vertically and lands horizontally on a runway, last landed in October 2014 after spending 674 days in orbit. It has flown three space missions so far, conducting activities that are mostly classified.

The Air Force owns two X-37B spacecraft, both of which were built by Boeing's Phantom Works division. The vehicles look like NASA's now-retired space shuttle orbiters, but are much smaller — just 29 feet long by 9.5 feet tall (8.8 by 2.9 meters), with a wingspan of 15 feet (4.6 m). In fact, two X-37Bs could fit inside the space shuttle's payload bay.

The X-37B mission launching Wednesday is called OTV-4 (short for Orbital Test Vehicle-4). Air Force officials have not said how long the mission will last.

 Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Copyright 2015 SPACE.com,  a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to NASA mission to use secret Air Force space plane
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/0519/NASA-mission-to-use-secret-Air-Force-space-plane
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe