Photo: The Planetary Society
At the end of this month, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy will carry out its third launch in a little over a year. The highly capable rocket will be carrying to orbit a variety of cargo, including a Deep Space Atomic Clock for NASA and a cluster of satellites for the U.S. Air Force.
Tucked away in the rocket’s nose will also be a “loaf-of-bread-sized” Cubesat spacecraft designed by The Planetary Society under the guidance of its CEO, one of our time’s most popular mechanical engineers, Bill Nye.
The CubeSat in question is called LightSail 2 and its main goal is to demonstrate the advantages of using sails to move about in the vastness of space. Not wind sails, of course, but solar ones, capable of harnessing solar radiation to generate acceleration.
The Planetary Society team, aided by fans all over the world, worked on the project for ten years. A first version of the spaceship was already tested when the LightSail 1 launched in May 2015. That prototype appeared to have failed two days into the mission, but efforts made by the ground team managed to get it up and running again, forming the basis for this year's machine.
In the case of LightSail 2, Nye is hopeful the sail will be able to raise the Cubesat’s orbit by using solar photon as a means of propulsion.
Solar sails as tools to move in space date back to the sixteenth century, when Johannes Kepler proposed “sails adapted to the heavenly breezes” after observing how a comet's tail is oriented in the opposite direction to the Sun. Since then, the concept has become a leitmotif of science fiction literature, but it stopped short of actually making ii into a functional spaceship.
Nye’s idea is supposed to show the world such a concept could work in practice. If it does, and if it is adopted by the space industry, it could completely revolutionize the way humans travel in space.
The CubeSat in question is called LightSail 2 and its main goal is to demonstrate the advantages of using sails to move about in the vastness of space. Not wind sails, of course, but solar ones, capable of harnessing solar radiation to generate acceleration.
The Planetary Society team, aided by fans all over the world, worked on the project for ten years. A first version of the spaceship was already tested when the LightSail 1 launched in May 2015. That prototype appeared to have failed two days into the mission, but efforts made by the ground team managed to get it up and running again, forming the basis for this year's machine.
In the case of LightSail 2, Nye is hopeful the sail will be able to raise the Cubesat’s orbit by using solar photon as a means of propulsion.
Solar sails as tools to move in space date back to the sixteenth century, when Johannes Kepler proposed “sails adapted to the heavenly breezes” after observing how a comet's tail is oriented in the opposite direction to the Sun. Since then, the concept has become a leitmotif of science fiction literature, but it stopped short of actually making ii into a functional spaceship.
Nye’s idea is supposed to show the world such a concept could work in practice. If it does, and if it is adopted by the space industry, it could completely revolutionize the way humans travel in space.
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