US military launches top-secret robotic spacecraft

A US Air Force unmanned spacecraft blasted off on Thursday from Florida, amid a veil of secrecy about its military mission.

The robotic space plane, or X-37B, lifted off from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas V rocket at 7:52 pm local time (2352 GMT), according video released by the military.

"The launch is a go," Air Force Major Angie Blair told AFP.

Resembling a miniature space shuttle, the plane is 8.9 meters (29 feet) long and has a wing-span of 4.5 meters.

The reusable space vehicle has been years in the making and the military has offered only vague explanations as to its purpose or role in the American military's arsenal.

The vehicle is designed to "provide an 'on-orbit laboratory' test environment to prove new technology and components before those technologies are committed to operational satellite programs," the Air Force said in a recent release.

Officials said the X-37B would eventually return for a landing at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, but did not say how long the inaugural mission would last.

"In all honesty, we don't know when it's coming back," Gary Payton, deputy undersecretary for Air Force space programs, told reporters in a conference call this week.

Payton said the plane could stay in space for up to nine months.

Flight controllers plan to monitor the vehicle's guidance, navigation and control systems, but the Air Force has declined to discuss what the plane is carrying in its payload or what experiments are scheduled.

Pentagon officials have sidestepped questions about possible military missions for the spacecraft, as well as the precise budget for its development -- estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars.

The results of the test flight will inform "development programs that will provide capabilities for our warfighters in the future," Payton said.

The space plane -- manufactured by Boeing -- began as a project of NASA in 1999, and was eventually handed over to the US Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office.

The Air Force has plans for a second X-37B, scheduled to launch in 2011.

X-37B robotic space plane aims for Thursday launch

LOS ANGELES – The military is poised to launch an unmanned winged spacecraft resembling a miniature space shuttle Thursday and it probably won't be a one-time shot.

Gary Payton, Air Force deputy under secretary for space programs, said Tuesday the Air Force has contracted for a second space plane depending on the success of the prototype's maiden flight.

"Currently, we're looking at a 2011 launch for that second tail number. That assumes everything goes properly as predicted on this first flight," Payton told reporters.

After a decade of development, the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle is slated to launch from Florida and spend up to nine months in orbit. It will re-enter Earth on autopilot and land like an airplane at the Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

The spacecraft will conduct classified experiments while in orbit. Payton said the Air Force's main interest is to test the craft's automated flight control system and learn about the cost of turning it around for launch again.

Built by Boeing's Phantom Works division, the X-37 program was originally headed by NASA. It was later turned over to the Pentagon's research and development arm and then to a secretive Air Force unit.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on the project, but the current total has not been released.

"After a tumultuous history of sponsorship, it's great to see the X37 finally get to the launch pad and get into space," Payton said.

Sandcastles On The Moon

Robots are coming to a Moon near you very soon. Aside from a new fleet of orbiters, some will be landing within three years. There will be rovers deployed on the Moon, and sample return missions. This new wave of missions is brought to you by the governments of the USA, China, India and a collection of private ventures.

With so much attention focused on revisiting the Moon, it's time to re-explore a basic task that's never really been practiced before. Can we work effectively with the lunar regolith?

Any serious talk of working or staying on the Moon includes ways of using lunar materials to our advantage. In its most crude form, this means shoveling lunar soil on top of a lunar base, to protect it from radiation and meteorite impacts. Other uses would be more sophisticated, such as making concrete from the soil, or refining the soil to extract metals, oxygen and other useful things.

Landing areas for spacecraft would need to be built, free from the debris that's normally kicked up by rocket exhaust. Berms of lunar soil would protect fragile structures from nearby launches and landings. We may even want to dig deep underground, to bury certain items.

All of this sounds simple in theory. Just take a big shovel or some type of construction gear, and dig. But is it really this straightforward? We don't properly understand the mechanical properties of the regolith, dust and rocks. We don't know how well equipment and techniques that work well on Earth will perform on the Moon.

During the Apollo missions, astronauts were surprised by the behavior of the lunar soil. It adhered quickly to their spacesuits and equipment. The regolith was also more difficult to penetrate than mission planners had suspected. Planting a rod for a flag was tricky.

During an attempt to drill a core sample, Apollo 15 astronaut James Irwin apparently suffered a minor cardiac problem, according to biometric telemetry.

We will need to gather more data on the handling of lunar soil if we want to do anything ambitious on the Moon, and the best way to do it is with machines, long before astronauts return.

Some private companies are already proposing small robotic lunar dump trucks, which could excavate and move the soil. Over a long period of time, these could steadily build up large structures. But how long would it take, and how effective would it be? That's not known right now.

Doing something as simple as getting a robot to build sandcastles on the Moon would be a step forward. It would be an exercise in mechanical engineering, and a test of how disturbed regolith behaves.

Can we make lunar bricks by fusing the soil with heat? Is it better to build up a berm of raw soil, then "cook" the exterior for strength? These are also unresolved issues.

Other tests we need to perform include placing radiation dosimeters under artificial lunar mounds, to test their shielding properties. Firing mortar shells or pellets at structures would also simulate meteorite strikes.

These questions can only be answered with a lot of missions, and a lot of testing. It will take time, but it needs to be done. Without this knowledge, we will never be able to use the Moon to its full advantage.

Dr Morris Jones is the author of The New Moon Race, available from Rosenberg Publishing.

ENDURANCE May Explore Europa's Oceans

Image comment: ENDURANCE would need to be scaled down for a prospective mission to the Jovian moon Europa
Image credits: Stone Aerospace

Europa is perhaps the most famous moon of Jupiter, and for good reason. Data sent back years ago by the Galileo spacecraft hinted at the fact that the small world might in fact be covered in a liquid ocean, although it could be buried as deep as 100 kilometers or more under a thick ice sheet. Still, the prospect of liquid water on a distant world is much too appealing for scientists to let it slide, and so they have been looking into devising methods of studying it for a long time, Space reports.

These efforts are finally beginning to pay off, they announce, as the ENDURENCE robot has just finished its second test season successfully. The machine, called the Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-Ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer, was put through trials at Lake Bonney, a peculiar landscape feature located in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica. The lake is composed of two “lobes” connected to each other via a narrow channel. It is covered by ice, just as the waters of Europa could be, and researchers needed to melt a hole through the cover before they could put the robot underwater.

During the experiments, the scientific instruments aboard ENDURANCE proved to work remarkably well, and researchers are hopeful that they may one day use a similar machine to explore Europa. They say that scaling back the current design is critical for this, given that the current robot weighs about 1,300 kilograms. Delivering such a heavy load as far as Jupiter is highly unlikely, provided that even the Curiosity rover, bound to go to Mars next year, is less than a ton, while being the size of a Mini Cooper. But experts are already working on other ideas other than miniaturization.

One possible option would be to create a “parent” explorer, outfitted with several mini-subs that could be operated individually. This means that the largest robot would only steer through safe locations, while producing coarse maps of its environment. Whenever an interesting structure is found, it could deploy specialized observatories, which would take high-resolution images and readings, and would also return samples to the parent explorer, for analysis. An additional problem that needs fixing is determining how to make the machine function with more autonomy, at the same time ensuring that the maximum amount of data is produced from the overall mission.

NASA Is Creating a New Breed of Robots

Image comment: NASA also collaborates with the private sector for its robots. Seen here is Robonaut2, a project the agency developed in cooperation with General Motors

Image credits: NASA

Although Project Constellation, the American space agency's approach to returning human astronauts to the Moon, appears to have failed, NASA says that space exploration will not only continue, but also accelerate in the near future. For this very purpose, engineers are currently working hard on developing a new class of explorations robots that may replace fragile instruments such as existing rovers and orbiters. The mechanical explorers of the future will have multiple abilities, and will endure for longer, despite the harsh conditions they are expected to find at their respective destinations, Space reports.

The new plan NASA has for space exploration, while sacking the “manned” portion, is more daring than ever. The agency plans to send robots to the Moon and Mars, the stated goals of the US space program, but also to a host of near-Earth objects (NEO). All of this will be done in the near future, with the express purpose of paving the way for human explorers to come. The 2011 budget proposal US President Barack Obama set forth this year features funding for two such missions.

One of those missions will begin next year, and will focus on giving experts in Earth-based control centers, or on the International Space Station (ISS), the ability to control robotic expeditions on the Moon. While they're at it, experts hope to test groundbreaking new technologies on our planet's natural satellite, such as mining water-ice. This resource could allow for the production of, well, water, oxygen for artificial air, hydrogen fuel for rockets and so on. All of this could be done automatically, so that incoming astronauts would find an already-established based when they arrive.

“Trying to do mining operations autonomously in a remote location and under extremely difficult conditions represents a huge challenge. But we're up to the task,” says NASA In-Situ Resource Utilization Project manager, Gerald Sanders. “The area where NASA could perhaps lead – an area which could affect society greatly – is robotics. NASA is doing amazing things in both robotics and human exploration assisted by all kinds of autonomous systems,” adds the new technology guru at NASA, Robert Braun. He is a robotics expert and an aerospace engineer, who over the years provided valuable insight for the teams constructing Mars-bound landers and rovers.