After waiting for a cosmic particle to hit the restart button and taking an inaugural selfie, the LightSail from Bill Nye’s Planetary Society had one final show: a fiery reentry into the atmosphere.
Well, no one actually saw it reenter as far as we know, but the little satellite would have been going fast enough and created enough friction with the atmosphere to be “self-luminous” in a pocket of superheated plasma.
The last data packet was sent on Sunday, but it was pretty garbled. LightSail hadn’t sent any readable data since its first selfie. While it might have been nice to get more info from the little probe, it did complete its task of unfurling the solar sails in space.
An amateur astronomer spotted the last signal from the spacecraft early today.
New post: LightSail still a faint signal http://t.co/IW4pYDcukd 01:39 UTC still a faint signal ~ 2 minutes ahead TLE pic.twitter.com/VX8N2Q4lCK
— Mike Rupprecht (@dk3wn) June 15, 2015
“If you plug the spacecraft’s final orbital elements into modeling software, you get an altitude of -53.6 kilometers at 01:39 UTC. In other words, the spacecraft should no longer have been a spacecraft,” Planetary Society digital editor Jason Davis wrote in a blog post. “But it’s fun to imagine a scenario in which LightSail’s solar sails snapped cleanly away as the CubeSat reentered, allowing the avionics and radio systems to skirt around the Earth for a few more orbits. One final act of defiance, so to speak.”
Lessons learned from LightSail’s mission will be applied to the next test, a full-on solar sailing demonstration in 2016. The project will allow scientists to figure out if using photons of light to move a spacecraft is a viable solution to space travel.
