BRENT: The LightSail spacecraft, designed and manufactured by The Planetary Society, has lost contact with Earth. The mission, designed to test technologies needed to propel a spacecraft through the action of sunlight, launched on May 20.
The Planetary Society announced it believes the problem is the result of an error in the software controlling the main avionics board.
If the software controlling the main avionics board is found to be the crux of the problem, mission engineers would be forced to reboot the system. Such a procedure would also likely require controllers to initiate a manual opening of the sail aboard the vehicle.
LightSail was operating at normal conditions on May 22, returning data packets to Earth every 15 seconds. Each time information was sent to Earth, a record of the transmission was recorded in an internal file on the spacecraft named beacon.csv. This spreadsheet-like file grows with each new record added to its list. An early version of the software used aboard the vehicle would crash whenever the beacon file grew to 32 megabytes in size, about the same amount of information as six typical songs. Although the developer of the software corrected this glitch, the update was not included on the LightSail.
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