A Sleuthing Enthusiast Says He Found the US Military's X-37B Spaceplane
mendax writes:
Ars is reporting:
It turns out some of the informed speculation about the US military's latest X-37B spaceplane mission was pretty much spot-on.
When the semi-classified winged spacecraft launched on December 28, it flew into orbit on top of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, which is much larger than the Atlas V and Falcon 9 rockets used to launch the X-37B on its previous missions. [...] This immediately sparked speculation that the X-37B would reach higher altitudes than its past flights, which remained in low-Earth orbit at altitudes of a few hundred miles. A discovery from Tomi Simola, a satellite tracking hobbyist living near Helsinki, Finland, appears to confirm this suspicion.
On Friday, Simola reported on social media and on SeeSat-L, a long-running online forum of satellite tracking enthusiasts, that he detected an unidentified object using a sky-watching camera. [...]
"Exciting news!" Simola posted on social media. "Orbital Test Vehicle 7 (OTV-7), which was launched to classified orbit last December, was seen by my SatCam! Here are images from the last two nights!"
Now if only we knew what it was doing so high in orbit!
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