Rocket Lab is acquiring Sinclair Interplanetary, a manufacturer of spacecraft hardware based in Toronto that has provided hardware for more than 90 satellites sent to orbit to date, including for ...

LightSail 2 is not humanity’s first success at sailing on sunbeams. That honor goes to IKAROS, a roughly 50-foot by 50-foot Japanese spacecraft weighing hundreds of pounds.

Your chances of seeing LightSail 2 depend greatly on the satellite's orientation, Jason Davis, a digital editor at The Planetary Society, told Space.com in an email.

In contrast, LightSail 2 weighs just 11 pounds. “Remember, low mass is good,” said Betts. A Revolutionary Flight LightSail 2 is far more ambitious than any of its predecessors. Its goal is to ...

The $7 million Lightsail-2 spacecraft was launched on a rideshare mission aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket on June 25, and was deployed by the Prox-1 satellite into an orbit of about 720 kilometers ...

The Planetary Society has declared its LightSail 2 mission a success after it did just that. The satellite deployed its solar ail last week, and now it has successfully maneuvered in space without ...

Flight by Light: Mission accomplished for LightSail 2 LightSail 2 captured this image of Earth on July 7th. It’s looking at the Caribbean Sea towards Central America, with north roughly at the top.

Data collected from LightSail 2 will be shared with other organizations, including NASA, which intends to launch its own solar sail-powered small satellite on a mission to explore a near-Earth ...

About 450 miles above Earth, a small satellite is drifting deeper into the cosmos — powered not by rocket fuel, thrusters or other contraptions. This satellite, called LightSail 2, is sailing on ...

LightSail 2 launched on June 25, one of the payloads lofted by a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. The spacecraft, about the size of a loaf of bread, successfully deployed four triangular sails of shiny ...

That satellite, dubbed LightSail 2 by its creators at the nonprofit Planetary Society, started off as a box about the size of a loaf of bread.

The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 satellite successfully unfurled its boxing ring-sized solar sail on Tuesday and is getting ready to absorb solar rays as its only energy source for propulsion.