LightSail may unfurl solar sail Wednesday after restoring contact with Earth
Attempt to patch buggy software that disabled communications unsuccessful
A solar sailing spacecraft that lost touch with Earth soon after launch has phoned home.
LightSail is now set to unfurl and begin testing its solar sails as early as Wednesday, says the Planetary Society, the non-profit group behind the project.
Originally, the spacecraft was expected to automatically deploy the solar sails in late June.
The Planetary Society, headed by CEO Bill Nye, best known as the Science Guy from his popular TV show, is a space advocacy organization co-founded by the late astronomer Carl Sagan.
LightSail is an effort to develop solar sailing, a technology that relies on ultra-thin reflective "sails" to capture the momentum from solar energy photons. The small, continuous acceleration allows a spacecraft propelled by solar sails to reach high speeds over time.
The bread-loaf-sized LightSail spacecraft was launched into orbit on May 20, and lost contact with Earth on May 22, due to a software bug that causes the flight system to crash once it collects more than 32 MB of data.
After eight days of silence, the spacecraft got back in touch with ground stations on Earth at 5:21 p.m. ET on Saturday.
The spacecraft is thought to have been rebooted by high-energy particles from space, as hoped.
<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/LightSail?src=hash">#LightSail</a> is back on line. A cosmic ray from long, long ago, and far, far away gave us a kick in the circuit board. <a href="http://t.co/VleLG29x4z">pic.twitter.com/VleLG29x4z</a>
—@BillNyeAfter the reboot, the ground control team tried to patch the software bug, but wasn't able to maintain stable enough communications to do so.
As a workaround, the team will be rebooting the spacecraft at least once per day.
Initially, after re-establishing contact with the spacecraft, the Planetary Society had planned to deploy the sails as early as Tuesday morning. However, it postponed the event to allow more time to test the spacecraft's image capture and download capabilities.
LightSail wasn't launched high enough to escape the Earth's atmospheric drag, but is a test designed to gather data for a 2016 flight in a higher orbit that will demonstrate "true solar sailing." The Planetary Society has a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for that mission.