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

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."

Comments

they're not "photovoltaic sails"

[sribe]

Sheesh. Nothing PV about them. (There are separate PV panels which provide power, but they are completely unrelated to the sail.)

Re:This should be a major embarrassment

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like as soon as the sails unfurl, the satellite will re-enter Earth's atmosphere because of high altitude drag.

You realize that is intentional, yes? They are limited by being a small secondary payload on a launch funded and primarily meant for another purpose. They are launching a subsequent sail next year that is designed to leave LEO rather than re-enter, as this one was planned to do all along.

Yes, they should not have had the log file problem, but this is their first ever spacecraft, designed on fuck-all budget as far as such things go. Please point us all to the web page(s) for YOUR operational spacecraft, so that we can see how the really good people do it. I'm sure we could all learn from your perfection.

Re:This should be a major embarrassment

[Dereck1701]

"4. Not placing the satellite high enough"

While I agree with your other points this one is likely out of their control. Cubesats due to their lack of backups, limited quality control and no attitude/orbit control systems are almost always put into low orbits that will degrade on their own within a year or so. And given this satellites obvious faults its probably not such a bad policy. There is enough junk in orbit as is without us throwing droves of dead cubesats into the mix.

Re:This should be a major embarrassment

[sjames]

And yet, they have a workaround for the csv problem, the reset did happen (and they were fairly sure it would), the batteries are now charged and the sail is deploying, and they expected it to re-enter fairly soon after deployment.

This is the test mission and it's quite successful in spite of problems. All with limited experience and a shoestring budget. They have learned a lot in the process, all of which will contribute to the success of the real thing which will fly soon.

crowdfunding and publicity campaign

[BatesMethod]

The LightSail kickstarter crowdfunding campaign is still active. Moneys donated at this point will help fund a publicity campaign.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/theplanetarysociety/lightsail-a-revolutionary-solar-sailing-spacecraft

Jason Davis' blog has mission updates:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/

This is a test mission. Still a historic achievement for solar sailing, though. The real LightSail mission will launch in 2016.

Re:This should be a major embarrassment

[Irate Engineer]

This was a test flight on a shoestring budget. This thing was never going to sail anywhere. The whole idea was to see if the power management and sail deployment could be accomplished in a CubeSat footprint. Re-entry was planned to occur soon after sail deployment and it's not a surprise or a disappointment. Not bad for a Kickstarter.

Re:This should be a major embarrassment

[silentcoder]

You realize that Bill Nye was one of the Engineers who designed the Boeing 747 right ? His credentials as an engineer were pretty damn well established before he ever hosted a children's show.
And clearly he has experience working in teams doing massive engineering projects on hugely complicated designs.

What he may not have much experience with is those teams working on a budget slightly less than the one you get from the sperm bank.