UPDATE – LightSail falls silent

Last week the Planetary Society launched the first privately funded Solar Sail spacecraft as a secondary payload on a Atlas V rocket.

During the first couple of days the spacecraft was transmitting data back to Earth during various passes over the ground stations. However the teams have not heard from the spacecraft since, they are now troubleshooting the issue and will either attempt to reboot the spacecraft from the ground or wait for it to automatically reboot.

Once we have further news on the status of the vehicle we will post a further updates.

Latest update from Planetary Society, they believe that the spacecraft has suffered a software glitch and is currently frozen, they have sent multiple reboot commands to the vehicle without success and may need to wait for the spacecraft to reboot itself, unfortunately they don’t know when that will happen because it is triggered by a charged particle hitting the vehicle.

If they are able to re-establish contact they will most likely deploy the sail manually.

 


Posted

in

,

by

Comments

One response to “UPDATE – LightSail falls silent”

  1. […] auch die dritte Mission der Planetary Society mit einem Sonnensegler vor dem Scheitern: Ein Gerücht von gestern Nachmittag ist leider wahr – das Light Sail-A hat sich seit dem 22. Mai nicht mehr gemeldet, offenbar […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *