Bill Nye and Planetary Society Set to Ride a Sunbeam with LightSail 2 Solar Sail

By Doris Elin Salazar 10 hours ago Spaceflight

Check out Google Maps to see where the LightSail 2 spacecraft will be orbiting.



Artist's concept of LightSail 2 above Earth.(Image: © Josh Spradling/The Planetary Society)
This Monday (June 24), the nonprofit organization The Planetary Society will launch LightSail 2, the first spacecraft propelled solely by sunlight, in a mission made possible by crowd-funding, officials said.

While it won't be the first spacecraft to successfully use a solar sail at some distance from Earth — that honor goes to the Japanese spacecraft Ikaros, which launched in 2010 — it is an important extension of that technology. The Planetary Society has twice attempted testing solar sailing in the past. LightSail 2's predecessor, a test mission called LightSail, launched May 20, 2015. Ten years prior, the organization had launched a lightsail dubbed Cosmos 1, but it was lost due to a rocket failure.

For Bill Nye, science communicator and CEO of The Planetary Society, the LightSail 2 mission taps into a long-held dream, inspired by his time spent 42 years ago sitting in Carl Sagan's classroom and listening to him talk about solar sailing, Nye said during a media teleconference held yesterday (June 20).

"With the transition into this new mission phase, we are one big step closer to uncovering the secrets of Psyche, a giant mysterious metallic asteroid, and that means the world to us," Lindy Elkins-Tanton, an Arizona State University planetary scientist and principal investigator on the Psyche mission, said in a statement. [Doomsday: 9 Real Ways Earth Could End]

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