LightSail Project Springs to Life Off Mexico Coastline Daniel McCarthy - Micro Cap Observer
go to original June 8, 2015

LightSail Deployment from TPS HQ (The Planetary Society)

The motor of the tiny solar sail, LightSail, sprang to life around 3:47 pm EDT or 19:47 UTC on Sunday afternoon at a coast in Baja California, Mexico and deployed as the spacecraft moved northwest to southwest.

According to mission manager David Spenser, “All indications are that the solar sail deployment was proceeding nominally,” and this was to pinpoint telemetry ground data which indicated that LightSail had moved out of range.

LightSail still remains out of range and will stay so till about 2:26 am EDT Monday. It is however expected that ground control teams will soon start moving images taken by LightSail’s cameras to its flight system, after which technicians will then download and improve the resolutions of the captured images.

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