LightSail 2 will no longer ride on the sun.
The Planetary Society's crowdfunded solar sailing craft re-entered Earth's atmosphere on Thursday morning after 3.5 years in the sun.
Since that date, the LightSail 2 team has not received any communication from the craft, leading them to conclude that it had given up the ghost after completing 18,000 laps around the planet.
"After more than three glorious years in the sky, LightSail 2 is gone, blazing a trail of lift with light, and proving that we could defy gravity by tacking a sail in space," Nye said in a statement. The mission was funded by many members of the Planetary Society.
LightSail 2 captured stunning photos of Earth from space.
LightSail 2 was the first small craft to demonstrate a controlled solar sail. Japan's Ikaros probe was the first craft of any kind to solar sail in space.
Light has a small amount of push due to its individual particles, which can be transferred to a reflective surface.
LightSail 2 has shown that solar sailing can be used to power small satellites.
LightSail Program Manager and Chief Scientist Bruce Betts wrote in a Planetary Society statement that deorbiting was always going to be LightSail 2's fate.
LightSail 2 was launched into the sky in June of 2019. The International Space Station is slightly higher than the altitude of 450 miles above Earth.
The fate of LightSail 2 was sealed at this altitude because of the dense atmosphere on Earth.
The large surface area of the craft's solar sail made it drag more than other craft of its mass.
A rock and a piece of paper are very different. The paper will be stopped more quickly than the rock. LightSail 2 is the paper for us. The International Space Station is more like the rock than it is. The International Space Station has to be boosted higher every few weeks to compensate for drag.
LightSail 2 experienced increased atmospheric drag due to a boost in solar activity. The activity from the sun heated the atmosphere and made the area denser.
The beginning of the end was marked by that. Solar sailing couldn't compete with the increased drag due to the increase in atmospheric density.
LightSail 2 had been dropping deeper and deeper into Earth's atmosphere, experiencing more and more drag, which increased the rate of its drop.
As the spacecraft got lower, the density increased, which caused it to get lower even faster.
LightSail 2 may have ended, but there is still work to be done. The team behind the mission is still analyzing the data collected by the craft.
The data will be shared with future space missions that use solar sails, such as NASA's NEA Scout, which launched on the agency's Artemis 1 mission on Nov. 16 and will hitch a ride on sunlight to travel to the moon.
"Despite the sadness at seeing it go, all those who worked on this project and the 50,000 individual donors who funded the Light Sail program should reflect on this as a moment of pride," Betts wrote.
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