Planetary Society Declares Success as LightSail 2 Sails on Sunbeams

by Ryan Whitwam

Rockets are great if you want to get someplace fast, but there’s something whimsical about sailing on a beam of light. The Planetary Society has declared its LightSail 2 mission a success after it did just that. The satellite deployed its solar ail last week, and now it has successfully maneuvered in space without the help of engines.

The Planetary Society launched its spacecraft aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in late June, which carried numerous other spacecraft into space. It took a decade of development for the organization to get LightSail 2 ready, and individual donations from some 50,000 supporters funded almost all of the $7 million price tag.

Last week, The Planetary Society announced the craft had successfully deployed its sail. That was a problem for the first version of the spacecraft, which suffered from communication issues when it headed to the edge of space in 2015. It never got its sail deployed before falling back into the atmosphere. However, that mission was never intended to actually use the sail. LightSail 2 was more ambitious from the start.

A light sail uses a large reflective surface area to harness the thrust from photons hitting the sail. LightSail 2 has a surface area of almost 30 square meters (322 square…