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user-inactivated  ·  3124 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The ISS passing in front of the moon... during the eclipse!

    I'll bet a 30" aperture fits in an X-37 no problem.

Now that is something I had not considered. Doing a back of the hand calculation... the X-37 is roughly 9 feet wide. A 36" mirror, known to be used already in multiple satellites, would need a mirror cell, if we go by normal standards, 1.25x bigger in diameter to hold it in place. That fits easily into that bay. Looking at the images, the X-37 is 29 feet long, the cargo bay looks a bit less than 1/3 that length, so say 8 feet. That would give enough room for a focal length of say 6 feet, and 24 or so inches for the cameras etc. Power and cooling come from the orbiter itself so you don't need the extra bulk behind the Hubble, for example.

Would an F2 camera be good for looking as something as small as a satellite in orbit? Something with that fast a focal length is usually used for wide-field imagery. Assuming of course that they did not go with a 20" mirror; that may work for close ups. ALSO! Assuming that they don't have some form of collapsible truss to make a longer focal length? Hmm... this gets neat to think about.

But, yea, and they can change the orbit of this thing. The guys on the ground who track the X-37 for fun have been having a blast watching it change orbits on them. They were commenting that the orbit adjustment burns were taking place over the ocean so that people on the ground could not track the burns.