LightSail Unfurls Its Sail
“The Planetary Society’s LightSail test mission successfully completed its primary objective of deploying a solar sail in low-Earth orbit, mission managers said today. During a ground station pass over Cal Poly San Luis Obispo that began at 1:26 p.m. EDT (17:26 UTC), the final pieces of an image showcasing LightSail’s deployed solar sails were received on Earth. The image confirms the sails have unfurled, which was the final milestone of a shakedown mission designed to pave the way for a full-fledged solar sail flight in 2016.”
Satellite Developed by Stellar Exploration Inc Completes First Deployment Test, Stellar Exploration
“Under a contract with the Society, Stellar developed and manufactured Lightsail. Two completed and tested satellites were delivered in early 2013 (Ecliptic Enterprises provided the final software update, and integration & testing support for the 2014 launch opportunity). This project was conceived as a major step along the solar sail roadmap Lightsail builds on the NASA experience with NanoSail-D2, doubling the sail dimension (thus quadrupling its surface area) and adding active attitude control, two cameras and other diagnostics. In turn, the Lightsail design evolved into the next solar sail missions, sponsored by NASA Flashlight and NEOScout.”
Software are hard! Still, all’s well that ends well.
Time is running out to get the sail properly tensioned and there seem to have been far too many problems to hope for anything beyond scraping in the primary mission objectives. That doesn’t in any way undermine the value of what has been achieved. I just think that, at this point, expectations need to be realistic.
If I were in charge (which I’m not) I would increasingly view this flight as an opportunity to create a list of bug-fixes to be implemented on LightSail-B. That would have to be the prime focus from now on.
I believe that was the intention all along. Obviously they hope to encounter as few bugs as possible, since every “fix” will then represent an untested element on the next flight. However this was always a test mission, I think the only way we could reasonably count it as a failure would be if they didn’t get to test the sail deployment, which represents the most novel and tricky part of this plan.