Solar Sail Spacecraft Back From the Dead

Ground control teams hope to get confirmation early Monday that an experimental spacecraft successfully deployed its solar sail, a key milestone to prepare for an operational mission next year.

Engineers working on the privately funded LightSail project wrestled with a computer software glitch and a troubled battery before the tiny spacecraft’s motor began unfurling an extremely thin 340-square-foot sail on Sunday afternoon.

The Planetary Society, a California-based non-profit space advocacy group, is keen to demonstrate an alternative space propulsion system known as solar sailing. The technology uses the pressure of photons of sunlight bouncing off a very thin film sail to generate forward motion, similar to how a boat’s sail can harness the wind.

LightSail-A hitched a ride into orbit on May 20 aboard an Atlas 5 rocket that carried the military’s X-37B miniature robotic shuttle.

Two days after launch, LightSail, which is about the size of a loaf of bread, fell silent, the victim of a computer software glitch. After more than a week, a stray cosmic ray hit rebooted LightSail’s computer and engineers proceeded with deployment of the spaceraft’s solar panel.

Then another problem, believed to be with the battery, halted operations on Wednesday, before engineers could deploy the spacecraft’s sails, the primary goal of the mission.

After three days of silence,  LightSail transmitted data on Saturday showing its batteries were changing for the first time since solar panel deployment.

“LightSail is back in business,” Planetary Society wrote on its website.

With battery levels appearing to continue to increase, project managers proceeded with the sail deployment at 3:47 p.m. EDT Sunday as the spacecraft flew off the coast of Baja California, Mexico.

Read more at Discovery News