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