Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Track Bill Nye’s LightSail 2 solar spaceship in real time as it makes history

By
LightSail
The Planetary Society

The LightSail 2 solar-powered spacecraft is officially operational — it’s now in orbit and made its first contact with Earth on Tuesday. You’ll now be able to track the ship live using an online dashboard.

The LightSail 2 is the result of a $1 million Kickstarter campaign organized and led by Bill Nye’s non-profit Planetary Society. In an interview with Digital Trends before the ship’s June launch, Nye said that the main objective of the mission is to get the spacecraft to orbit around the Earth using sunlight as its fuel source, demonstrating the viability of “solar sailing.”

Recommended Videos

The idea is that if the LightSail 2 is successful, the technology could help make it possible to traveler further and deeper into space at a lower cost than is possible today.

Related

The Planetary Society launched a similar spacecraft in 2015, which proved the solar sailing concept could work. That vessel took some pictures of its surroundings but remained at a low enough altitude that it was subject to atmospheric drag. The LightSail 2 is capable of going higher into orbit than its predecessor, reducing that drag.

The LightSail 2 hitched a ride into space last week aboard Space X’s Falcon Heavy rocket. As planned, it delivered its first signals back to mission control at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California on Tuesday.  Those first signals included health and status data as well as a Morse code beacon indicating the vessel’s call sign.

If you want to keep track of the spacecraft, the Planetary Society has also launched a new mission control dashboard for the vessel. With it, anyone can access the most up-to-date information about the spacecraft during its journey including information about how long the LightSail 2 has been on its mission, what the temperature is inside the spacecraft, and whether or not its solar sail is deployed. The dashboard will also allow you to find the vessel’s current location and find out if it will be passing overhead.

“The Georgia Tech Prox-1 spacecraft did its job perfectly, delivering LightSail 2 to the desired orbit for solar sailing,” LightSail 2 project manager Dave Spencer said in a statement.  “Receiving the initial radio signal from LightSail 2 is an important milestone, and the flight team is excited to begin mission operations.”  

The LightSail 2 is expected to remain in orbit for roughly the next year.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Emily Price
Emily Price
Emily is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. Her book "Productivity Hacks: 500+ Easy Ways to Accomplish More at…
NASA selects 9 companies to work on low-cost Mars projects
This mosaic is made up of more than 100 images captured by NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter, which operated around Mars from 1976 to 1980. The scar across the center of the planet is the vast Valles Marineris canyon system.

NASA is expanding its plans for Mars, looking at not only a big, high-budget, long-term project to bring back a sample from Mars but also smaller, lower-cost missions to enable exploration of the red planet. The agency recently announced it has selected nine private companies that will perform a total of 12 studies into small-scale projects for enabling Mars science.

The companies include big names in aerospace like Lockheed Martin and United Launch Services, but also smaller companies like Redwire Space and Astrobotic, which recently landed on the surface of the moon. Each project will get a 12-week study to be completed this summer, with NASA looking at the results to see if it will incorporate any of the ideas into its future Mars exploration plans.

Read more
Japanese satellite chases down space junk
Image of a piece of space debris seen from Astroscale's ADRAS-J satellite.

There's a growing problem of junk cluttering up the space beyond our planet. Known as space debris, it consists of broken satellites, discarded rocket parts, and other tiny pieces of metal and other materials that move around the planet, often at extremely high speeds. Space debris has threatened the International Space Station and impacted China's space station, and junk from space has even fallen onto a house in the U.S. recently.

Many scientists have called for greater environmental protections of space, but how to deal with all the existing debris is an open problem. Much of the debris is hard to capture because it is oddly shaped or traveling at great speed. Cleanup suggestions have involved using magnets, or nets, or lasers. But now a system from Japanese company Astroscale has taken an up-close image of a piece of space debris it has been chasing down, and it could help make future cleanup easier.

Read more
NASA’s Orion spacecraft has ‘critical issues’ with its heat shield, report finds
The Orion crew module for NASA’s Artemis II mission.

The Orion crew module for NASA’s Artemis II mission. NASA/Kim Shiflett

NASA is intending to use its new Orion capsule to send astronauts to the moon under its Artemis program, but a new report finds that issues with the capsule's heat shield could be a risk to crew safety. The report from NASA's inspector general was released this week and details issues with the heat shield, which lost some material during the first flight of Orion during the Artemis I mission in 2022.

Read more