The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is quietly building its quiet supersonic airplane. NASA's X-59 is a supersonic aircraft designed to test technologies that could hopefully make commercial supersonic travel tolerable by reducing the sound produced by air compression (a boom) when an aircraft crosses the sound barrier. The X-57 team joined the aircraft tail section to its body late last month at Lockheed Martin's facilities in Palmdale, California, and NASA is aiming for a test flight later this year.
NASA's X-59 Is Almost A Full Place As Agency Contractor Finishes With Tail Section Assembly
All the hype surrounding NASA these days is about the agency's Artemis program, which will soon place astronauts on the Moon. The agency flew its Artemis 1 mission to a lunar orbit late last year and announced the crew for the first crewed lunar mission since the Apollo era earlier this month.
However, quietly in the background, NASA and its primary contractor for the X-59 project, Lockheed Martin, are building the X-59 aircraft. Lockheed was awarded the design contract for the plane in 2016, and after a series of small-scale wind tunnel tests, a full award ensued two years later in 2018. The first series of tests validated the design's flight stability and angle of attack to ensure that a pilot could control it in case of an anomaly.
This control is crucial for the X-59 as it is a rare aircraft designed without a front window. The plane's design requires a long nose to ensure that the air flowing above and below it does not make a loud sonic boom, which makes putting a window in front of the cockpit useless as it would be too far behind the tip of the nose and provide limited visibility. However, the pilot will have some direct visibility in the form of side windows, with front visibility provided by a screen and live cameras.
Powering the X-59 is General Electric's F414-GE-100 engine. This engine is used in various fighter jets, such as the Saab Gripen and the F/A-18S Super Hornet. The X-59 itself is designed to reach a cruising speed of 1.42 Mach or roughly 940 miles per hour and a top speed of 1.5 Mach (990 miles per hour).
Lockheed attached the engine to the aircraft in November last year, marking another crucial step in the assembly process. Teams started assembling the X-59 in 2021 when its fuselage, tail assembly and wings were merged in 2021. After this, the partial aircraft was powered up for the first time and shipped a couple of months later to Texas for the first series of tests on the frame.
Lockheed, which also makes the most advanced fighter aircraft in the world, tested the X-59 at the same facility where the F-16 was built. The tests included evaluating its structural strength and sensor accuracy and matching the data with computer simulations. Two months later, in late April 2022, the plane was back in California.
Another series of wind tunnel tests on a larger scale model were conducted. NASA also refined its photographic techniques to take pictures of the soundwaves traveling faster than the speed of sound. After the engine was installed in November, March's tail section attachment is one of the final stages before a series of exciting tests to see the plane's engine power up. NASA aims to conduct the first flight test of the X-59 later this year.
Refference- https://wccftech.com
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