LightSail 2 completes second year in space
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Continue taking pictures
We love sharing pretty pictures from LightSail 2 with the public. These pictures also serve an important engineering purpose by showing us how the sail is degrading due to the harsh space environment, and how the four metallic booms that hold the sail tight are behaving.
Recently we have seen possible degradation of the sail through shrinkage, crinkles, and likely delamination of the sail’s reflective coating in some areas. We have also noticed systematic changes in the position of sail boom tips in images, as well as non-systematic changes that may be caused by thermal expansion and contraction of the sail booms. Analyses are ongoing.
Automated fault detection
Whether it’s a big-budget NASA mission or a crowdfunded CubeSat, computer glitches and unexpected behaviors are part of every space mission. Automated fault detection software can help speed the detection of problems.
Purdue researcher Justin Mansell developed a fault detection and diagnosis algorithm that he applied to LightSail 2 as part of his Ph.D. dissertation. When applied to LightSail 2 telemetry data, Mansell’s software has successfully spotted anomalies, such as temporary glitches in the magnetometers and gyros, that may have otherwise been overlooked or found more slowly.
Sharing, coordinating, and archiving
LightSail 2 is meant to enable and support future solar sailing missions. A big part of our extended mission is sharing what we are learning. We publish peer-reviewed journal articles, make conference presentations, and conduct public outreach through social media and articles like the one you’re reading right now.
We also interface directly with other solar sailing missions. NASA has three such missions planned: NEA Scout, Solar Cruiser, and ACS3. We share data and facilitate additional studies to help these mission teams learn from our experiences. Furthermore, we document and archive our LightSail 2 data so that it will be available for analysis by future missions.
Fly the spacecraft
There’s one more important aspect of the LightSail 2 extended mission: we have to fly the spacecraft!
I’d like to extend a big thank you to our core team*. We meet on a daily basis to assess spacecraft health and performance, and to plan future activities. Our team carries out ongoing maintenance and monitoring to keep the spacecraft functioning properly. We uplink orbital elements twice a week so that the spacecraft knows where it is. Maintenance activities also include clearing file space on the onboard computer as needed, working issues and anomalies as they arise, and monitoring engineering telemetry.
These past two years of LightSail 2 operations would not have been possible without the support of our members and donors. Thanks to your support, we’ll be able to continue learning as much as we can from this unique mission!
*The LightSail 2 Operations Core Team is: Dave Spencer (project manager, JPL/Vestigo Aerospace), John Bellardo (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo), Barbara Plante (Boreal Space), Justin Mansell (Purdue University), and Bruce Betts (program manager, The Planetary Society).
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