LightSail-1 passes critical design review

LightSail-1, the Planetary Society's new ultra-light 3U Cubesat-based solar sail spacecraft, has passed its Critical Design Review.

At a two-day meeting in Pasadena, a team - including JPL project veterans Bud Schurmeier, Glenn Cunningham, Viktor Kerzhanovich, and Aerospace Corporation's Dave Bearden - reviewed the LightSail-1 project from soup to nuts and gave the thumbs up to proceed with building the spacecraft's hardware and software.

LightSat-1will demonstrate that sunlight alone can propel a spacecraft in Earth orbit. The 4.5-kilogram spacecraft is an amazing advance in technology -- analogous in my mind to the miniaturization of computers two decades ago.

LightSail-1 has:

• 10 solar panels -- four deployable arrays with panels on each side plus one panel on the top and one on the bottom of thespacecraft,
• Two 2-megapixel cameras mounted at the end of two of the solar panels (only one camera is visible in the diagram),
• Four Sun sensors mounted at the end of four of the solar panels,
• Six tiny ultra-sensitive accelerometers that will provide a direct measure of the light-force,
• A momentum wheel for attitude control (colored red in the diagram above),
• Three single axis gyros (yellow),
• Three torque rods (gray) also part of the attitude control system,
• A battery (salmon-colored, looking like a laptop computer battery)

More details at
http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/
solar_sailing/20100625.html

LightSail-1
http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/
solar_sailing/lightsail1.html