On Friday, the Area Drive published a picture taken final yr from a digicam mounted on the secretive X-37B house aircraft whereas excessive above the Earth. Space.com notes that the “one different glimpse” of the aircraft in house was whereas it was “deploying from Falcon Heavy’s higher stage” throughout its December 2023 launch.
The Area Drive says it snapped the photograph throughout experimental “first-of-kind” aerobraking maneuvers “to soundly change its orbit utilizing minimal gasoline.” The Air Drive said in October this may contain “a collection of passes utilizing the drag of Earth’s ambiance,” and that after full, it might resume its different experiments earlier than de-orbiting.
That is the X-37B’s seventh mission; its sixth, which concluded in November 2022, lasted about two-and-a-half years (or 908 days) and was its longest mission to this point. Previous to its launch, the Area Drive described mission goals that included “working in new orbital regimes” and testing ”future house area consciousness applied sciences.“ It additionally talked about an onboard NASA experiment involving plant seeds’ radiation publicity throughout lengthy spaceflight missions.
