Solar Sailing Spacecraft Unfurls Its Sails, Finally

Lightsail in space, released 9 June 2015. Courtesy Planetary Society It hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing for LightSail, but on Sunday its tribulations came to a happy conclusion. Since its launch on May 20, technical glitches prevented the LightSail satellite from accomplishing its one and only task: unfurling four massive Mylar sails that, theoretically, could harness energy from the sun to propel the spacecraft through space. The satellite is a prototype, meant to serve as a proof of concept for this design of spacecraft. And finally, at 3:47 p.m. EDT Sunday, LightSail sprung to life and all 344 square feet of its sail opened up to the vast expanse of space.