We are now just over 24 hours away from the beginning of the launch window for the third Falcon 9 Heavy from Kennedy Space Center, which among other payloads wlll carry The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 spacecraft. We'll talk about it here.


GO LIGHTSAIL!!! GO TPS!!!

Well, it made it into orbit & apparently sail deployment will occur in about a week.

The spacecraft has successfully separated from its host Prox-1 and has downlinked. Full story and details of future events here.

Panel (and panel-mounted camera) deployment occurred on Friday evening US Pacific time. Images and status update here.

i remember the efforts to get this going in the 90s, its been such a long time coming, but finally here it is!
they put together a cool gif anim of the unfurling sails

images look much better than i expected, all raw images are here

Truly a triumph for citizen science and the realization of a dream long held. Congratulations to the LightSail team!!!

Lovely views! I still remember the disappointment with Cosmos 1; glad to see there are more reliable launchers these days!
Now to look forward to Lightsail being spotted from the ground...

Me also!!

I am more excited to see what sort of data they gather. They have speculated for hundreds of years about this sort of thing.


Bring on the data!!!

Thanks, that gif is mine

Please have fun with the image data! The pictures are a lot better than I expected, too. I'm curious to see creative approaches to dealing with the bizarre wide-angle camera distortion. My approach is simply to enlarge the original photo by a factor of 5 or so, then apply the Photoshop geometric correction filter at its maximum level multiple times, then downsize to 2x original resolution. I don't find that sharpening the resulting image helps much, but I suspect I'm just not picking the right set of parameters.