Now you can check in on Bill Nye’s solar sail as it orbits Earth
A new dashboard will let people track the progress of one of Earth’s most unique satellites from anywhere in the world. The Planetary Society just announced a new website that will constantly display the status of the crowdfunded satellite as it orbits the planet.
LightSail 2 is the successor to LightSail, a spacecraft that launched in 2015 and whose primary mission was to show that a sail could unfurl in space. The team lost communication with the first LightSail a week after it made it to space, then got communication back, then lost it again, then, finally, got a gorgeous picture of the sail unfurled.
LightSail 2 is more ambitious and will actually try to maneuver through space, and even boost itself into different orbits using...