LightSail 2 completes second 12 months in area

Proceed taking images

We love sharing pretty images from LightSail 2 with most of the people. These images moreover serve an important engineering goal by displaying us how the sail is degrading on account of harsh space environment, and the way in which the 4 metallic booms that preserve the sail tight are behaving.

Simply these days we now have seen doable degradation of the sail by shrinkage, crinkles, and certain delamination of the sail’s reflective coating in some areas. We have moreover noticed systematic modifications inside the place of sail improve concepts in images, along with non-systematic modifications that might be introduced on by thermal enlargement and contraction of the sail booms. Analyses are ongoing.

Automated fault detection

Whether or not or not it’s a big-budget NASA mission or a crowdfunded CubeSat, computer glitches and sudden behaviors are part of every space mission. Automated fault detection software program program might also assist velocity the detection of points.

Purdue researcher Justin Mansell developed a fault detection and evaluation algorithm that he utilized to LightSail 2 as part of his Ph.D. dissertation. When utilized to LightSail 2 telemetry data, Mansell’s software program program has effectively seen anomalies, similar to momentary glitches inside the magnetometers and gyros, which can have in another case been missed or found additional slowly.

Sharing, coordinating, and archiving

LightSail 2 is meant to permit and assist future photograph voltaic crusing missions. An enormous part of our extended mission is sharing what we’re finding out. We publish peer-reviewed journal articles, make conference shows, and conduct public outreach by social media and articles similar to the one you’re finding out correct now.

We moreover interface instantly with completely different photograph voltaic crusing missions. NASA has three such missions deliberate: NEA Scout, Picture voltaic Cruiser, and ACS3. We share data and facilitate additional analysis to help these mission teams examine from our experiences. Furthermore, we doc and archive our LightSail 2 data so as that it’ll possible be on the market for analysis by future missions.

Fly the spacecraft

There’s one more important side of the LightSail 2 extended mission: we now need to fly the spacecraft!

I’d like to extend an infinite due to our core workforce*. We meet every single day to guage spacecraft properly being and effectivity, and to plan future actions. Our workforce carries out ongoing maintenance and monitoring to take care of the spacecraft functioning appropriately. We uplink orbital elements twice each week so that the spacecraft is conscious of the place it is. Maintenance actions moreover embrace clearing file space on the onboard computer as needed, working factors and anomalies as they arrive up, and monitoring engineering telemetry.

These earlier two years of LightSail 2 operations would not have been doable with out the assistance of our members and donors. Due to your assist, we’ll have the power to proceed finding out as so much as we’re capable of from this distinctive mission!

*The LightSail 2 Operations Core Crew is: Dave Spencer (enterprise supervisor, JPL/Vestigo Aerospace), John Bellardo (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo), Barbara Plante (Boreal Home), Justin Mansell (Purdue School), and Bruce Betts (program supervisor, The Planetary Society).