Solar Sailing

Here is an idea to keep our national security secrets safe. Put the NASA public affairs people in charge of them.
If they can do as good a job at hiding our secrets as they do of hiding exciting NASA activities such as the nano-sail, then we would have nothing to fear from the spy activities of any country on the face of the earth.

They didn't really hide it but it probably wasn't widely reported.

It was supposed to have been deployed 6 weeks ago but didn't for some reason. It's active lifetime was about 5 days to send radio beacons on amateur radio frequencies and to deploy the test solar array.

The battery has now died and it will reenter in about 100 days. Satellite observers are encourage to send in observations.

LOL! So true...

"...operating as planned..." in this case means had just enough juice left to deploy the sail, then start uncontrolled re-entry?

So far, then, there has been (maybe) only one successful solar sail mission (IKAROS), out of 4?

OTOH, since this isn't really a SOLAR sail, then maybe it's successful, leaving solar sail success at 1/3.

From the Planetary Society (heaven forbid I get NASA info from NASA)I believe the purpose is to de-orbit satellites by using solar pressure. Not a solar sail, exactly, but interesting.