The Orbital Express mission was launched by an expendable Atlas 5 rocket at 10:10 p.m. eastern standard time (EST)—1510 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)—on Thursday, March 18, 2007. It was launched from NASA’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

The mission consists of two satellites: ASTRO (Automonous Space Transport Robotic Operations) and NextSat (NEXT-generation serviceable SATellite) servicing spacecraft.

A team of engineers from DARPA and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center are managing the mission. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, is responsible for the development of new technologies for use with the U.S. military.

The goal of the mission was to test the ability of robotic satellites to automatically and inexpensively rendezvous and perform various activities in order to free up astronauts for more important tasks in the future.

For the past three months, Orbital Express has successfully fulfilled its mission in space. Its final rendezvous and capture maneuver occurred just before midnight on June 29, 2007. ASTRO successfully grappled onto NextSat.

During the weekend of June 30-July 1, 2007, the ASTRO spacecraft will use its robotic arm one last time to remove a backup computer and then return it to its original position.

With its mission complete, U.S. Air Force officials have informed DARPA and NASA officials that the Orbital Express has completed its mission and additional support from the ground will not be provided and extra experiments in space will not be performed.

Sometime the week of July 2, 2007, the two Orbital Express spacecraft will be intentionally taken out of orbit so they do a controlled burn-up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The Air Force maintains that all the science attainable from the mission has been accomplished and that the risks and costs outweigh any minor benefits in leaving them in orbit for additional research activities.

NASA and DARPA officials are not in disagreement with this Air Force decision but they were hopeful that additional time would be given to the pair of spacecraft for additional robotic techniques to be carried out.

Orbital Express is a pioneering space mission that will eventually lead other spacecraft to autonomously (without human intervention) service satellites while in orbit about the Earth and to perform other space-related repair and recovery activities.

Additional information about Orbital Express is found at: http://www.darpa.mil/tto/programs/oe.htm (DARPA), http://www.ballaerospace.com/oexpress.html (Ball Aerospace), and http://www.boeing.com/ids/advanced_systems/orbital.html (Boeing).

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NASA  Research  Space  William Atkins