Projects: LightSail - Solar Sailing
The Year in Pictures: 2009
Planetary Society to Sail Again
LightSail
Credit: David Imbaratto, Stellar Exploration, for The Planetary Society
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On November 9 The Planetary Society announced LightSail,
a plan to sail a spacecraft on sunlight alone by the end of 2010. The
new solar sail project, boosted by a one-million-dollar anonymous donation,
was unveiled at an event on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C on the 75th anniversary
of the birth of Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan, a long-time advocate
of solar sailing.
LightSail is an innovative program that will launch
three separate spacecraft over the course of several years, beginning with
LightSail-1,
which will demonstrate that sunlight alone can propel a spacecraft in Earth
orbit. LightSails 2 and 3, more ambitious still,
will reach farther into space.
Taking advantage of the technological advances in micro-
and nano-spacecraft over the past five years, The Planetary Society will
build LightSail-1 with
three Cubesat spacecraft. One Cubesat will form the central electronics
and control module, and two additional Cubesats will house the solar sail module.
Cameras, additional sensors, and a control system will be added to the basic
Cubesat electronics bus.
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