LightSail Team Prepares for Possible Tuesday Sail Deployment, Planetary Society
“LightSail is almost ready for its moment in the sun. This afternoon, mission managers gave the go-ahead for a manual solar sail deployment as early as Tuesday, June 2 at 11:44 a.m. EDT (15:44 UTC), providing the spacecraft completes an arduous set of Monday preparations. Since waking up Saturday after eight days of silence, the spacecraft has been busy sending telemetry back to Earth, snapping test images and preparing itself for sail deployment.”

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member 🖖🏻

16 replies on “LightSail Reboots Itself – Now Ready to Sail”

      1. Now I need to devote hours of my life to re-watching that show!

  2. Say you wanted to setup a refueling operation. Could solar sail tech. ever work well enough to power an empty cargo vehicle from earth or mars to Ceres? I guess my question is can this really be practical in the near future? Sure has taken many decades to get this show on the road?

    P.S. Still betting that bright spot on Cerus is ice here 🙂

    2. Possibly if the solar sail were large enough. The force acting on a reflective sail increases directly with area. The problem is that the force exerted on a solar sail falls off with the inverse square of the distance. Since Mars is on the order of twice as far from the Sun as Earth, the force exerted on a solar sail at Mars would be about ¼ what it would be at Earth. At Ceres it would be about ⅛ of what it would be at Earth. The important thing to note is that these are very small numbers. At Earth a 100m x 100m reflective solar sail would produce a thrust of about 2.3 N (0.5 lbs).

  3. The satellite is in a tumble. If they can get it to deploy, that slow the tumble rate or not?

    1. Yes, it would slow the axial spin rate, anyway – much like a ballerina or ice skater slows down their spinning by moving their limbs away from their body – but that will happen only if it can be deployed without tearing or wrapping around the satellite.

      1. It would be great to see if the the sail stabilizes as a result of asymmetrical light pressure. That would be a rather useful serendipitous experiment.

        The adjustable vanes on the ends of Mariner 4 Mars probe at the solar panel tips were used to help control the craft in 1964.

        CLICK IMAGES TO EXPAND

        http://planetary.s3.amazona…

        http://chapters.marssociety…

  5. In 1964 Arthur C. Clark published “Sunjammer” in the Boy Scout magazine “Boy’s Life”. I possibly still have that issue buried amidst the detritus of my youth.
    It was about a Solar yacht race from earth orbit to past the Moon. Here it is renamed as The Wind From The Sun:

    http://www.baenebooks.com/c…

    1. And dont foget “The Mote in God’s Eye” by Pournelle, Niven.
      That is about an alien spacefaring species that comes to visit US using a ground based laser to propel their version of a light sail starship.

      1. One of my favorite books. In fact I just re-listened to it via audiobook a few weeks ago.

Comments are closed.