LightSail 2 to launch next month on SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket

The LightSail 2 satellite of the Planetary Society is ready to embark on an ambitious mission to demonstrate the power of sunlight for propulsion.

Of a weight of only 5 kilograms, the bread-sized spacecraft, called CubeSat, is expected to take off on June 22, 2019 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. Once in the space, LightSail 2 will deploy a solar sail the size of a boxing ring and will attempt to climb into its orbit using the gentle thrust of the solar photons.

This is the culmination of a 10-year project with a history of origin linked to the 3 scientific engineers who founded The Planetary Society in 1980.

"Forty years ago, my teacher Carl Sagan shared his dream of using a solar sailing spacecraft to explore the cosmos, and the Planetary Society is fulfilling that dream," said Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society. "Thousands of people from around the world came together to support this mission, we could not have done it without them, Carl Sagan and his colleagues Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman created our organization to empower people everywhere. in the world to advance space science and exploration.We will launch! "

LightSail

LightSail is a project funded by citizens of the Planetary Society to send a small spacecraft, powered solely by sunlight, into Earth's orbit.

If successful, LightSail 2 will become the first spacecraft to mount its orbit around the Earth using sunlight. Although the light does not have mass, it has a dynamic that can be transferred to other objects. A solar sail exploits this momentum for propulsion. LightSail 2 will demonstrate the application of solar navigation to CubeSats, a small standardized spacecraft that has made spaceflight more affordable for academics, government organizations and private institutions.

LightSail 2 will fly into space on the mission of the Ministry of Defense's Space Testing Program 2 (STP-2), which is scheduled to be launched on 22 June 2019, by sending 24 satellites out of 3 different orbits. LightSail 2 itself will be enclosed in Prox-1, a spacecraft designed by Georgia Tech and originally designed to demonstrate close operations with other spacecraft. Prox-1 will deploy LightSail 2 7 days after launch.

After a few days of state and state checks, the 4 double-sided solar panels of the LightSail 2 will open. About a day later, 4 metal dams will unfurl 4 triangular Mylar sails. The sails, which cover a combined area of ​​32 square meters, will turn to the Sun on half of each orbit, which will give the spacecraft a small boost of less weight than a trombone. About a month after the deployment of the sail, this continuous thrust should lift the LightSail 2 orbit by a measurable amount.

The Planetary Society launched an almost identical spacecraft, LightSail 1, in 2015, which successfully tested the sails deployment system of this craft. LightSail 2 will fly in an orbit of 720 kilometers altitude, where the acceleration due to sunlight will overcome the atmospheric drag. The probe may be visible in the night sky for a year for observers within 42 degrees of the equator, including the United States as far north as Chicago and New York.

The company launched a larger sail called Cosmos 1 in 2005, which was not put into orbit after the Russian missile crash of the spacecraft. Planetary Society co-founder Louis Friedman led a study of NASA's solar sails in the 1970s that allegedly allowed a spacecraft to travel to Halley's comet. Fellow Society co-founder Carl Sagan presented a mock-up of the spaceship on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1976.

The results of the LightSail 2 mission are already helping to inform future solar navigation projects from other organizations. NASA's NEA Scout spacecraft will sail to the moon on the first flight of the space launch system and use a solar sail to visit an asteroid close to the Earth. The Planetary Society shares the LightSail project data with NASA through a Space Act agreement.

The LightSail project began in 2009. The satellite was built by Stellar Exploration, Inc. The main contractor for the integration and testing is Ecliptic Enterprises Corporation, testing, storage and ground support being provided by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Bruce Betts, Chief Scientist of the Planetary Society, is the LightSail Program Manager. The project leader and mission leader is David Spencer from Purdue University.

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