Planetary Society Sets Sail on New Solar Sail Project

Posted At : November 9, 2009 5:12 PM | Posted By : leonard
Related Categories: Education Station , The Sun , Commercial Space , Exploration , Space and Science

The Planetary Society today 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.

The new project will launch three separate solar sails over the next several 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.

Lightsail-2 will demonstrate a longer duration flight to higher Earth orbits.

LightSail-3 will go to the Sun-Earth Libration Point, L1, where solar sails could be permanently placed as solar weather stations, monitoring the geomagnetic storms from the Sun that potentially endanger electrical grids and satellite systems around Earth.

James Cantrell, CEO of Strategic Space Inc, is Project Manager of LightSail-1.

Stellar Exploration will build the spacecraft in San Luis Obispo, CA.

Other team participants include the Cubsesat development group at California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, and a team at Russia's Space Research Institute.

For more information, go to:

http://www.planetary.org/about/press/releases/2009/1109_Planetary_Society_to_Sail_Again_with.html

By LD/CSE