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LightSail Wakes Up After Silent Spell and Tries To Spread Solar Sails

Posted by samzenpus on from the tacking-around-the-moon dept.

An anonymous reader writes: After a second outage LightSail's controllers have re-established contact with the experimental spacecraft, and plan to begin the process for unfurling its photo voltaic sails. LightSail is a solar sail propelled test spacecraft that was launched on May 20. Two days later, it went offline because of a software glitch. "It's exciting," said William Sanford Nye, the [Planetary] society's chief executive, who is better known as Bill Nye the Science Guy. "It's anxious. It's anxiety producing."

3 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Re:they're not "photovoltaic sails" by Irate+Engineer · · Score: 5, Funny

    Welcome to Slashdot, where even the submitters don't bother to RTFA!

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  2. Dual outages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Rumor has it the LightSail team installed software they downloaded from SourceForge, the bundled adware blew the stack and caused outages. Next time they'll know not to download anything from SourceForge.

  3. Re:speaking as a backer... by FatdogHaiku · · Score: 4, Funny

    Shoestrings! Bah, they WISH they had shoestrings...
    all they got was some elastic from Bill Nye's loafers!

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