The Planetary Society is sailing a mission on pure solar power today, following the successful unfurling of a 32 square meter reflective sheet from the LightSail2 CubeSat.
The team confirmation came at 1850 UT 23 July 2019. Telemetry indicates the cubesat’s onboard motor controllers worked as planned. Onboard cameras took photos, which was confirmed in summary data but the larger image files are stored for later downlink, beginning with the satellite’s next orbital pass, at 2033 UT.
LightSail2 was a tertiary payload on the STP-2 mission launched on 25 June; it was itself deployed from a secondary payload, Georgia Tech’s Prox1 nanosat, a kinetic experiment platform.
