LightSail phones home after 8-day silence

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LightSail phones home after 8-day silence
Science Wire | EarthSky

The Planetary Society’s LightSail spacecraft went silent after two days of communications, falling victim to a suspected software glitch following a successful launch into orbit aboard an Atlas V rocket on May 20, 2015. Now, as expected, LightSail has phoned home. Jason Davis, who is covering the mission for the Planetary Society, wrote at his blog on May 30, 2015:

At 5:21 p.m. EDT (21:21 UTC), an automated radio chirp was received and decoded at the spacecraft’s Cal Poly San Luis Obispo ground station. Another came in eight minutes later at 5:29 p.m. The real-time clock on board the spacecraft, which does not reset after a software reboot, read 908,125 seconds—approximately ten-and-a-half days since LightSail’s May 20 launch.
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The LightSail team will soon determine when to attempt deployment of the spacecraft’s thin, lightweight reflective sails. LightSail is a solar sailing spacecraft test mission and precursor to a 2016 mission. The satellite is about the size of a loaf of bread and consists of four identical triangular Mylar solar sails, attached to four 4-meter booms. When fully deployed, its square sail is designed to be pushed upon by radiation pressure from our sun. In full-scale, future light sail missions, steady pressure from the sun’s radiation would at first move the craft slowly, but eventually accelerate up to very fast speeds. The Planetary Society hopes solar sails will someday be used to propel spacecraft to the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond.

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LightSail’s exact position is not yet clear, complicating two-way communication. ...

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The primary goal of this test flight is to practice the procedure for sail deployment.

LightSail’s second flight, scheduled for 2016, will mark the first controlled, Earth-orbit solar sail flight. The plan there is that LightSail will ride along with the first operational launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.

This isn’t the first-ever test of solar sail technology. Japan’s Ikaros solar sail was tested in 2010, and NASA’s Nanosail-D spacecraft orbited in 2011.

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