LightSail deployment scheduled for Tuesday
Assuming all goes well with the orbital preparations today, LightSail will perform its test deployment on Tuesday at 11:44 am.
If successful, this deployment will achieve several significant engineering firsts, the most important of which will be to have demonstrated that a cubesat can be used for such a task. Proving that fact will increase their commercial usefulness for future space endeavors.
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Assuming all goes well with the orbital preparations today, LightSail will perform its test deployment on Tuesday at 11:44 am.
If successful, this deployment will achieve several significant engineering firsts, the most important of which will be to have demonstrated that a cubesat can be used for such a task. Proving that fact will increase their commercial usefulness for future space endeavors.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
What is the objective of this mission? Just deploy the sail, or is the sail supposed to be used to change the orbit or something?
The objective is to test the deployment, not use the sail. They can’t test the deployment technique on the ground, but need it to be in orbit to do so. Hence this engineering flight.
It might be that they will try to use the sail afterward, but I suspect not, as it is in a low orbit that will decay quickly.
To expect to climb the gravity well from LEO with a lightsail will require sails built *in*orbit*, and made sacred. “Holy” sails are going to be sails made as Freeman Dyson proposed some decades back. Take a Drexlerian sail made by vaporizing aluminum onto a smooth sheet of frozen water, above about 30 nanometers thickness. Drill closely spaced holes in this sail with electron beams small enough that 95+% of the light still reflects from what is left as “aluminum chicken wire”. This will allow air molecules to pass through the sails at LEO altitudes, eliminating the vast majority of the drag of standard lightsails.
This demonstration is about deployment. Cubesats that can *make* lightsails *in*orbit* should be the next step!
wouldn’t they be more properly “holey”?
Awww, you’re no fun! ;-)
Deployment now scheduled for Wednesday, June 3.
Test images from camera are coming in.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/2015/20150601-lightsail-partial-images.html
I am just not a fan of the light sail idea.
It can not work outside the solar system. Not enough light for thrust effect.
And the use of it inside the solar system is extremely limited.