Surprise! NanoSail-D solar sail does its thing!

William Atkins
Tuesday, 25 January 2011 07:53

Science - Space

NASA announced on January 24, 2011, that its NanoSail-D spacecraft has unexpectedly unfuried its solar sail after over a month being stuck. The stunning news is a bright hope at helping to reduce the amount of space junk.

Dean Alhorn (check out twitter.com/#!/dalhorn), from the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (Huntsville, Alabama), is the principal investigator and lead engineer for the NanoSail-D mission.

When he realized that the spacecraft had unfurled its sail, he exclaimed 'We're solar sailing!' [NASA 'Solar Sail Stunner']

Check out this NASA article (Solar Sail Stunner) for an image of what this solar sail spacecraft looks like.

Alhorn, added, 'This is a momentous achievement.'

The solar-sail spacecraft, known as NanoSail-D, is located about 400 miles (650 kilometers) above Earth. NASA states that it is ''¦ the first-ever solar sail to circle our planet.'

The NanoSail-D team thought the mission was doomed because for the past month and one-half the solar sail was stuck inside the Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite (FASTSAT) spacecraft.

The FASTSAT spacecraft was launched on November, 20 2010, along with five other experiments, from the Kodiak Launch Complex (Kodiak, Alaska) via a Minotaur IV rocket.

So, when it came time for the solar sail to be unfurled - nothing happened! Zilch!

Alhorn stated, "We couldn't get out of FASTSAT. It was heart-wrenching'”yet another failure in the long and troubled history of solar sails."

However, on January 17, 2011, the NanoSail-D ejected itself from the FASTSAT - without warning and without any fanfare or trumpets.

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