LightSail Just Won't Give Up
Deployment! LightSail Boom Motor Whirrs to Life, Planetary Society
“LightSail’s tiny solar sail deployment motor sprung to life Sunday afternoon, marking an important milestone for The Planetary Society’s nail-biting test mission. Sail deployment began at 3:47 p.m. EDT (19:47 UTC) off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, as the spacecraft traveled northwest to southeast. Telemetry received on the ground showed motor counts climbing to the halfway point before LightSail traveled out of range. Power levels were consistent with ground-based deployment tests, and the spacecraft’s cameras were on. “All indications are that the solar sail deployment was proceeding nominally,” wrote mission manager David Spencer in an email update. LightSail is currently out of range until 2:26 a.m. EDT Monday. Ground control teams at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Georgia Tech will begin transferring the spacecraft’s images from its cameras to flight system. ”
LightSail Reboots Itself – Now Ready to Sail, earlier post
I’d have to say that the Planetary Society doesn’t give up, recalling the unfortunate experience the first time they tried to launch a sail.
…and the second…
And it’s been seen in Europe:
https://dl.dropboxuserconte…
good work!
Since this thing is in orbit, doesn’t the shape of the orbit change slightly once the sail is open? Is the change detectable?
The comments they are making are that it’s causing the orbit to decay fairly rapidly, though less than expected. (several seconds an orbit) It seems they did not give themselves the ability to steer the thrust vector the sail is creating. Visibility predictions being provided at heavens-above.com are, therefore, somewhat unreliable.
I was at a CubeSat workshop two weeks ago, and saw a presentation on the subject. They were expecting reentry between three and ten days after sail deployment, due to atmospheric drag. They also have a LightSail B which should be launched next year. It gets placed in a higher orbit (~720 km), should not have this problem with drag, and will either have, or have a chance to use, more attitude/thrust control capability.
Hopefully, LightSail-B is currently under the hardware engineers’ magnifier and software engineers’ compiler, having the various faults its predecessor revealed mitigated.