The U.S. Navy’s X-47B drone on Wednesday completed its first-ever landing aboard an aircraft carrier in what officials heralded as the future of naval aviation.
The bat winged-shaped jet built by Northrop Grumman Corp. made a smooth approach, touched down on the flight deck and came to a sudden halt after catching an arresting cable aboard the USS George H.W. Bush at about 1:40 p.m. The ship — the Navy’s newest nuclear-powered carrier — was sailing about 70 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, Va., in the Atlantic Ocean.
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus drew comparisons of the event to pilot Eugene Ely’s first-ever landing of a biplane on a ship in 1911.
“It is not often that you get a chance to see the future, but that’s what we got to do today,” he said during a news conference with reporters afterward. “This is an amazing day for aviation in general and for naval aviation in particular.”
The service’s top officer, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, called it a “miraculous technological feat.”
Canary, a plasma spectrometer, will investigate the interaction of approaching spacecraft with the background plasma environment around the ISS and disturbances in the ionosphere caused by space vehicles. The device will also provide a better understanding of the origin and impact of plasma irregularities in the Earth’s ionosphere, and demonstrate low-cost techniques for monitoring those conditions. Canary is the second Wafer Integrated Plasma Spectrometers (WISPERS) device created by APL; engineers used innovative MicroElectroMechanical (MEMS) technology when designing WISPERS to reduce size and energy consumption while increasing sensitivity. The first WISPERS device was launched last year aboard FalconSat-5. “Canary and WISPERS will provide on-orbit data for understanding how spacecraft operations affect the natural environment,” says Robert Osiander, principal investigator for WISPERS at APL.
Canary gathers particles of plasma (an electrically-charged gas) through a hole smaller than the diameter of a human hair; the particles are then sorted according to energy and type by a titanium electrostatic analyzer less than a tenth of an inch thick. By measuring the type and energy levels of plasma around it, Canary can provide warnings of potentially hazardous operating conditions.
“Canary will add an important new tool to those we use to understand the near-Earth space environment,” says Larry Paxton, a space scientist at APL and member of the Canary team. “Canary will also demonstrate a new, cost-effective approach to supporting our nation’s operations in space.”
Canary was built by APL in coordination with the Space Physics and Atmospheric Research Center (SPARC) at the U.S. Air Force Academy, and was funded in part by the Naval Research Laboratory‘s Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) program. Canary is part of the STP-H3 payload, which is integrated and flown under the direction of the Department of Defense’s Space Test Program. Canary is scheduled to be installed on the ISS on flight day 3.
In addition to Cornell’s 
