We have a solar sail! As we reported on the 19th, the little cubesat that was thought to be lost has now been found, and now today, Friday, Jan. 21, engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center confirmed that the NanoSail-D deployed its 100-square-foot polymer solar sail in low-Earth orbit and is operating as planned. The sail actually deployed late on Jan. 20, and it was quite interesting to see how ham radio operators were helping the engineers monitor the critical beacons sent out by the spacecraft — with communications also being sent back and forth via Twitter. The video above is from Henk Hamoen (@PA3GUO on Twitter) who operates a ham radio station in the Netherlands. The NanoSail-D sends an beacon packet every 10 seconds, which contains data about the spacecraft systems operation, and Hamoen and others were able to help make sure things were going as planned.
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Read the rest of Success! NanoSail-D Deploys (183 words)
© nancy for Universe Today, 2011. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: nanosail-d, solar sail
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