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Planetary Society elated as ‘crashed’ LightSail rebooted by stray cosmic ray

Planetary Society elated as ‘crashed’ LightSail rebooted by stray cosmic ray


LightSail – Flight by Light
AFTER eight days in the dark, a privately funded solar sail satellite has rebooted itself and sent reassuring messages to its excited operators on Earth.
“Our LightSail called home!” US science educator Bill Nye “the Science Guy” exulted in a press release this morning. “It’s alive!”
The LightSail cubesat — a small, standardised satellite module about the size of a shoebox designed to offer universities and research organisations cheap “piggyback” rides into space — was boosted into space early last week.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station i
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Wednesday, May 20, 2015. The rocket is carrying the X-37B space plane for the U.S. Air Force as well as 10 CubeSats and the Planetary Society's LightSail Mission. (Craig Bailey/Florida Today via AP) Source: AP
It was carried aloft in the same rocket that launched the US Air Force’s ultra-secret X-37B reusable, shuttle-like spacecraft on its fourth clandestine mission on May 20.
Initially all appeared well until the tiny satellite — little more than the processor of a laptop computer bundled with an extendible frame wired to a 105 square-metre sheet of ultra-thin reflective plastic — experienced a software glitch and froze.

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