Lightsail 2 ’s Successful Deployment Makes it the First Steerable Spacecraft Powered by the Sun

This is a version of the TIME Space newsletter that went out July 26, 2019.   Dear readers, Jeff Kluger is out this week. I’m Alejandro de la Garza, a researcher and reporter at TIME, and a writer on all things technology. Humanity might have gotten a tiny bit closer to interstellar travel this week, with a very, very small satellite. That satellite, dubbed LightSail 2 by its creators at the nonprofit Planetary Society, started off as a box about the size of a loaf of bread. And on July 23, the little-cube-that-could deployed a 344 sq. ft. sheet of thin, reflective mylar, becoming the first steerable solar sail ever launched into Earth’s orbit. The Planetary SocietyDeployment of half of LightSail 2’s square sail from one of it’s on-board cameras. The animation runs at about 100 times actual speed. Solar sails, for those who don’t know, sound a bit crazy—but also may be just crazy enough to work. Most rockets burn their onboard fuel to accelerate in space and then coast on their built-up momentum. Solar sails, on the other hand, are powered by photons emitted by the sun. They accelerate very slowly, but since their thrust is continuous, they can conceivably achieve tremendous speeds. LightSail 2 isn’t the first solar sail. In 2010, JAXA, Japan’s space agency deployed a non-steerable solar sail that traveled past Venus, and in 2015 the Planetary Society launched LightSail 1, which deployed its sail, but was orbiting too low...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized newsletter Space Source Type: news