WASHINGTON: A solar sailing spacecraft that lost touch with Earth soon after launch has phoned home.
LightSail is now set to unfurl and begin testing its solar sails as early as Wednesday, says the Planetary Society, the non-profit group behind the project.
Originally, the spacecraft was expected to automatically deploy the solar sails in late June.
The Planetary Society, headed by CEO Bill Nye, best known as the Science Guy from his popular TV show, is a space advocacy organization co-founded by the late astronomer Carl Sagan.
LightSail is an effort to develop solar sailing, a technology that relies on ultra-thin reflective “sails” to capture the momentum from solar energy photons. The small, continuous acceleration allows a spacecraft propelled by solar sails to reach high speeds over time.
The bread-loaf-sized LightSail spacecraft was launched into orbit on May 20, and lost contact with Earth on May 22, due to a software bug that causes the flight system to crash once it collects more than 32 MB of data.
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