After spending more than a year orbiting our planet on a
hush-hush mystery mission, the U.S. Air Force's X-37B space plane is due
to return to Earth any day now.
Air Force officials haven't announced exactly when the robotic X-37B space plane
will land. But on May 30, they said that the spacecraft's homecoming
should occur in the "early- to mid-June timeframe" a window that will
close in the next week or so.The Air Force launched the X-37B on March 5, 2011, sending the reusable space plane design on its second-ever space mission. The X-37B currently zipping around Earth is known as Orbital Test Vehicle-2, or OTV-2.
California's Vandenberg Air Force Base is viewed as the most likely primary landing site for OTV-2. Edwards Air Force Base, also in California, serves as a backup.
The X-37B looks much like NASA's now-retired space shuttles, only much smaller. The space plane is about 29 feet long by 15 feet wide, with a payload bay the size of a pickup truck bed. A solar array packed in the payload bay powers the spacecraft. For comparison, two entire X-37Bs could fit inside the payload bay of a space shuttle.
OTV-2's flight represents a big jump for the X-37B space plane. The vehicle has been aloft for 462 days as of June 8, more than doubling the on-orbit time of the first space-flown X-37B, known as OTV-1.
OTV-1 launched in April 2010 and landed that December, staying on orbit for 225 days well under the spacecraft's supposed 270-day limit. OTV-2 is nearly 200 days over that limit on its current flight, and the calendar keeps ticking over.
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