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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."

2 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. speaking as a backer... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's easy to criticize a low budget spacecraft. "They shouldn't have had a log file overflow". "They should have tested panel deployment under realistic conditions". That covered 99% of the comments in the previous slashdot thread about this thing.

    And some of those criticisms are valid, make no mistake... but I'm inclined to cut them a little slack. This is a citizen-funded spacecraft developed on a shoe-string budget with a tiny team, caught up in schedules not of their own making. The first attempt is for them to learn from, and learning they are. Not everything has gone perfectly! But they have several of these planned, and the lessons they learn from the first will be applied to the following ones.

    I think it is mildly incredible that within the next year or two, we might see a fucking Kickstarted spacecraft leave low earth orbit using a solar sail.

  2. Re:This should be a major embarrassment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wait, lemmegetthisstraight - it's somehow a "major embarrassment" to have put a spacecraft in orbit, which is sending back photos, was funded by space enthusiasts out of their own pockets, and has now achieved the nearly all of its intended objectives?

    Because they have now had a successful sail deployment, which was what this thing was supposed to do. The only remaining thing is to send back a picture of the deployed sail. Despite the glitches, it has done everything they wanted from it, including acting as a test to shake out problems for the next one.

    If only anything I've ever done in MY life could be such as "major embarrassment"...