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LightSail 2, Planetary Society solar sail mission
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post Jun 24 2019, 02:49 AM
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We are now just over 24 hours away from the beginning of the launch window for the third Falcon 9 Heavy from Kennedy Space Center, which among other payloads wlll carry The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 spacecraft. We'll talk about it here. smile.gif


GO LIGHTSAIL!!! GO TPS!!!


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A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.
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post Jun 25 2019, 09:11 PM
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Well, it made it into orbit & apparently sail deployment will occur in about a week.


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post Jul 3 2019, 01:45 AM
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The spacecraft has successfully separated from its host Prox-1 and has downlinked. Full story and details of future events here.


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post Jul 7 2019, 09:48 PM
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Panel (and panel-mounted camera) deployment occurred on Friday evening US Pacific time. Images and status update here.


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atomoid
post Jul 24 2019, 11:08 PM
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i remember the efforts to get this going in the 90s, its been such a long time coming, but finally here it is!
they put together a cool gif anim of the unfurling sails

images look much better than i expected, all raw images are here
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post Jul 25 2019, 12:46 AM
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Truly a triumph for citizen science and the realization of a dream long held. Congratulations to the LightSail team!!! smile.gif


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Explorer1
post Jul 25 2019, 02:37 AM
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Lovely views! I still remember the disappointment with Cosmos 1; glad to see there are more reliable launchers these days!
Now to look forward to Lightsail being spotted from the ground...

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post Jul 25 2019, 04:25 PM
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Guests






QUOTE (Explorer1 @ Jul 25 2019, 03:37 AM) *
Lovely views! I still remember the disappointment with Cosmos 1; glad to see there are more reliable launchers these days!
Now to look forward to Lightsail being spotted from the ground...



Me also!!

I am more excited to see what sort of data they gather. They have speculated for hundreds of years about this sort of thing.


Bring on the data!!!
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elakdawalla
post Jul 25 2019, 05:03 PM
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QUOTE (atomoid @ Jul 24 2019, 03:08 PM) *
i remember the efforts to get this going in the 90s, its been such a long time coming, but finally here it is!
they put together a cool gif anim of the unfurling sails
images look much better than i expected, all raw images are here

Thanks, that gif is mine biggrin.gif

Please have fun with the image data! The pictures are a lot better than I expected, too. I'm curious to see creative approaches to dealing with the bizarre wide-angle camera distortion. My approach is simply to enlarge the original photo by a factor of 5 or so, then apply the Photoshop geometric correction filter at its maximum level multiple times, then downsize to 2x original resolution. I don't find that sharpening the resulting image helps much, but I suspect I'm just not picking the right set of parameters.


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