Just two days after the release of LightSail towards his epic journey, published by the great scientist and science writer Bill Nye, the spacecraft came to a disappointing halt. According to the latest update of the mission, the small spacecraft was ‘silenced’ due to a software failure.
The LightSail was released by the Planetary Society in order to boost a small CubeSat using energy from the sun as fuel. A prototype spacecraft was launched to test the sequence of the implementation of its sail, thus opening the possibilities for launching the mission scheduled for 2016. The LightSail was operating normally until last Friday, but there was a problem within the spacecraft’s software . Jason Davis of The Planetary Society, said in a statement: “The LightSail is likely to be disabled, not unlike a computer that stops working”
The LightSail is designed to transmit a “signal” to. the Earth, and save a copy of the information to a file called beacon.csv. The board’s primary system continued doing this until the file came to 32 megabytes, which ended up breaking the system. The LightSail was no communication and stopped sending data to the system on Earth.
Although this flaw in the software was later corrected by the manufacturers, software LightSail does not include this important update. Operators have tried to restart, but the spacecraft can not answer. Researchers need to manually restart the system, but as the CEO of Planetary Society Bill Nye already points out: “There is no one in space to hit the reset button”
The mission has now been put on hold until. researchers find a way to restart the system. Davis suggests that the ship could restart if a charged particle in deep space reached its electric component in the “right” way.
“This is not an uncommon occurrence for CubeSats, or something bigger like a spaceship. The experience of Cal Poly with CubeSats suggest try a reboot in the first three weeks, “added Davis
Source:. LightSail
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