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‘Mission success’: Solar sail shifts its orbit

LightSail 2 solar sail
This image was taken during the LightSail 2 sail deployment sequence on July 23. The sail is almost fully deployed here and appears warped near the edges due to the spacecraft’s 185-degree fisheye camera lens. The image has been color corrected and some of the distortion has been removed. The sun is visible at center. (Planetary Society Photo / CC BY-NC 3.0)

It may be “mission accomplished” for the Planetary Society’s solar sail experiment, but its privately funded LightSail 2 mission is far from over.

Five weeks after LightSail 2’s launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, the nonprofit membership society celebrated the spacecraft’s ability to raise the highest point of its orbit by a little more than a mile (1.7 kilometers), using the force of sunlight pressing against its 18.4-foot-wide, 4.5-micron-thick reflective Mylar sails.

Demonstrating solar sail steerability was the point of the decade-long campaign to build and fly LightSail 2 and its predecessor, LightSail 1. The project’s estimated $7 million cost was covered by contributions from Planetary Society members and other donors.

“On behalf of the tens of thousands of people around the world who came together to help the dream of solar sailing move forward, we’re thrilled to declare mission success for LightSail 2,” Planetary Society chief scientist Bruce Betts, who serves as program manager for LightSail, told journalists today during a teleconference.

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LightSail 2 opens up in orbit to fly on sunshine

This fisheye image was taken during the LightSail 2 sail deployment sequence on July 23. Baja California and Mexico are visible in the background. The image has been de-distorted and color-corrected. (Planetary Society Photo / CC BY-NC 3.0)

The nonprofit Planetary Society says its LightSail 2 experiment spread out its solar sails today, nearly a month after it took a piggyback ride to orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

Following through on 2015’s LightSail 1 mission, this latest flight is designed to demonstrate not only that the 18.4-foot-wide, 4.5-micron thick reflective Mylar sails can be successfully deployed from a shoebox-sized spacecraft, but also that they can be used to maneuver in orbit.

LightSail 2 is pushed by the pressure of sunlight, much as a seagoing sailboat is pushed by the pressure of the wind. Theoretically, bigger and more capable sails could be used to drive a spacecraft around the solar system, or even outward to other stars.

The $7 million project is largely funded by Planetary Society members and private donors. LightSail 2 was packed aboard the Falcon Heavy as part of a larger payload called Prox-1 and delivered to orbit on June 25. Since then, the spacecraft has been going through checkouts and snapping pictures of the planet below.

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Falcon Heavy puts solar sail and much more in orbit

Launch pad video shows the Falcon Heavy liftoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. (SpaceX via YouTube)

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket had its first night launch tonight, sending 24 different spacecraft toward three different types of orbit to test a wide range of technologies.

The triple-barreled rocket rose into the sky from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 2:30 a.m. ET Tuesday (11:30 p.m. PT Monday), kicking off the Defense Department’s Space Test Program-2 mission, or STP-2.

Minutes after launch, the Falcon Heavy’s two side boosters separated and flew themselves to two landing pads set up at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, not far from the launch pad. The twin touchdowns were greeted with raucous cheers from SpaceX employees watching the webcast at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.

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