Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - LightSail Takes Flight!

Episode Date: July 3, 2019

A giant SpaceX Falcon Heavy lifted off in the early hours of June 25th. One week later, the LightSail 2 solar sail was released to begin its epic mission. You’ll join the thrilling launch, meet LightSail team members and leaders of other missions, and get a solar sail update in this very special episode. You’ll also get the chance to win an ISS Above system in the What’s Up space trivia contest! Learn more about all of this week’s topics at:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/0703-2019-light-sail-2-launch.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1, yes! Ignition! Woo! Can you feel the light way over here? Go LightSail! LightSail 2 takes flight, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Wow. LightSail 2 is now flying free. More than 700 kilometers above our world. It is talking with the controllers who have begun a week of tests and trials before our little solar sail spreads its wings. We'll get a full report from LightSail

program manager Bruce Betts when we get to this week's What's Up segment. First though, I'm going to do my best to draw you into the beginning of this long anticipated mission. I was standing next to Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye when the mighty Falcon Heavy lifted off at the Kennedy Space Center, but the tale begins hours earlier. Members of the Planetary Society communications team joined a hundred or so other journalists under the blazing Space Coast sun on the late morning of Monday, June 24th. under the blazing Space Coast sun on the late morning of Monday, June 24th. We boarded buses with SpaceX guides and security personnel and headed toward the most historic launch pad on Earth. Our digital editor and embedded light sail reporter, Jason Davis, was there. Jason, please tell people about this awesome location we're standing at.

We are inside the perimeter fence of 39A of Pad 39A, where the Falcon Heavy rocket is already ready for launch tonight. And it's really cool. We're really close to it. All right. This is radio podcast. Describe the view from here. What do you see? Yeah, so we're up on a little grassy knoll right now looking towards Launch Pad 39A. There's a big concrete rise coming out of the ground with grass all around it. And then what's left of the old space shuttle structure, it's a big black tower with now SpaceX's crew access arm on it, the little thing that the astronauts will walk on. Right next to it is the rocket.

It's the triple core Falcon Heavy II. The side boosters are dirty where they landed last year. And the middle one is brand new. And yeah, it's a really beautiful sight under a clear blue sky. And it's hot too. Yeah, it is hot. And between here and the rocket, these snowy egrets, you'd think they'd have learned by now. This is not the place to be. Yeah, you would think they're going to come 1130 p.m. tonight here. They're not going to be wanting to hang around the rocket, that's for sure. Thank you, Jason. Thanks, Matt. Well, we were hoping for an 11.30 p.m. launch, the very beginning of the launch window.

We soon learned that the Falcon Heavy would not lift off till at least 2.30 a.m., if at all. Falcon Heavy would not lift off till at least 2.30 a.m., if at all. But there was much to keep us busy till then, including opportunities to talk with many of the men and women involved with the 23 other payloads on the big rocket. I want you to meet a couple of them before we get back to LightSail. Sure. I'm Dr. Jill Soybert. I'm the Deputy Principal Investigator of the Deep Space Atomic Clock Technology Demonstration Mission. It's a mouthful. It is. I didn't know if we would run into anybody else here today who has as much to be excited about as we do, but clearly you equal, maybe surpass us. I don't know. Oh, I'm super excited. I have been working on this mission since 2011 when I first started at JPL. And so it's been a while. I've been waiting

patiently. So I've been reading up on this atomic clock, the most accurate timepiece ever to go into space, right? It's the most stable timepiece to ever go into space. It's very, very accurate, but it's the most stable timepiece. That means that time doesn't drift away. So if I turn on my clock and I synchronize it with another clock, zero error to start, that clock won't drift away. It won't gain or lose time. And because I love these kinds of numbers, how much over the course of X number of years might it drift? It would take 10 million years to drift one second. So imagine if your alarm clock did that on your bedside table and you never had to reset it. I'd never be able to claim that I overslept because

the clock was off. We're ruining that for you, yes. Why send an incredibly stable atomic clock into space? So the point of this demonstration mission is to demonstrate this technology so that we can use it to navigate future spacecraft. Okay, navigating through space, you're tracking a spacecraft. It separates from your launch vehicle. You've got to guide it all the way to Mars or Jupiter or Saturn. And the way that we track it throughout space is we measure how long it takes a radio signal to get to the spacecraft and back again. But right now we have to measure that transit time on the ground.

Because the only clocks that have the accuracy and stability to do that safely enough are big. They're the size of refrigerators. So, you know, you can't really send a refrigerator out to Mars very easily. So we need to shrink that down. And this, the Deep Space Atomic Clock Technology Demonstration Mission has taken that refrigerator performance and shrunk it down to something that's like a toaster oven size. So now something that we can conceivably send on a spacecraft. Jill Soybert of the Deep Space Atomic Clock Mission. If you want to do rocket science, you're going to need rocket propellant. That is, unless your spacecraft is propelled by the light of the sun. And some rocket propellant is very dangerous stuff. Not so much the propellant to be tested by another of the Falcon Heavy's 24 payloads. My name is Chris McLean. I work at Ball

Aerospace, and I am the principal investigator on NASA's technology demonstration mission, demonstration mission, which is the green propellant infusion mission. We put the moniker of green on it, which is great. It's a very low toxicity fuel. When you sit it on a bench in an open beaker, you don't smell it. It has no vapor pressure. Hydrazine and the monomethyl and NTO, they're different because they will evolve immediately and have reactions. And before you go on, I mean, talk a little bit more about hydrazine, which is used, has been used for decades, right? But it's nasty stuff.

Well, you know, I've been working with hydrazine myself for 25 years. It is a volatile as well as toxic propellant. And so if you spill some, it's in the air, it gets everywhere, it can cause, we've had, you know, energetic issues. Energetic issues meaning this stuff causes problems. That sounds like a euphemism. Energetic disassembly is what we used to call the term. So when I look at that fuel, though, that is a great, absolute robust fuel that will never be replaced. When we look at green propellants, again, you look at the in-space propulsion technology area.

I've worked from hall thrusters to arc jets, which are augmented hydrazine and ammonia systems that are dabbled a little bit in ion engines. And now we have this green propellant, and they all fit a certain mission capability. So when you study, hey, my mission needs to do this type of delta V, this type of maneuver, this type of pointing, you will find a sweet spot for every fuel,

and there will be some overlap in certain areas. One of the things about the AFM 315E... That's the propellant's official name? Right. Well, yeah, it was developed by the Air Force, AFM 315E, and it was originally invented by a chemist called Tommy Hawkins, who has since retired. I like to call it Tommy's hot sauce, but we haven't come up with an official name for it. And it has a very low toxicity. The toxicity dose is similar to that of pharmaceutical medications you can get. So you can imagine if you drank a cup of penicillin or whatever, I'm not sure it's exactly equivalent. That's not going to be good for you. Drinking a cup of this fuel is not going to be good for you too. But if you were a small exposure, it's not going to be good for you. Drinking a cup of this fuel is not going to be good for you too, but if you were a small exposure, it's not going to be harmful for you.

But one of the beauties of this fuel is it's a monopropellant, which means it catalytically decomposes inside the engine's reaction chamber. It doesn't need an oxidizer. It's an all-in-one. It's kind of like gunpowder. It's kind of like gunpowder. Well, if I compare this to hydrazine, hydrazine is a single fluid that catalytically decomposes. AFM-350 and E actually is a blend propellant, and it's almost a biopropellant blend in a single fluid. And that's how we get some of the performance out of it. So first back to the safety issue.

This stuff, in order for it to hit the catalytic threshold for decomposition, has to be about 350 degrees C. And hydrazine, it can be at room temperature and have a catalytic reaction. So, you know, if you spill a little bit of hydrazine, it can react immediately. You spill some of this stuff, it just sits there. Like, I've done a lot of propulsion technology demos in the last 25 years. And what we were always doing with those programs, arc jets, hull thrusters, towels, was getting something up in orbit and proving to the industry that, hey, now we have a viable technology that's been demonstrated on

orbit. We can use this technology. Because when somebody's going in there and they have a high risk mission like a James Webb, they don't want to be doing something that doesn't have flight experience. So to me, that's one of the big parts of this program is just demonstrating that. That's Green Propellant Principal Investigator Chris McClain. More hours pass. I'm now waiting for another bus that will take us to the KSC Saturn V Center, the magnificent facility that houses a complete Saturn V rocket, still the largest ever built, and surrounds it with the finest Apollo Moon mission memorabilia and exhibits I've ever seen. Waiting with me is another key player in the creation of LightSail 2. John Bellardo of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, CubeSat Research Lab. We had that wonderful visit a couple

of months ago. We didn't break LightSail when you took it out of the pod a little bit for me, and it's great to see you here. I'm not surprised. Yeah, it's great to see you as well, Matt. So when you showed me a cabinet as we were walking into your clean room up there in the lab, you said there were, I mean, there were a whole bunch of CubeSats in there in storage, and you said they were for a mission. Absolutely. Those were the CubeSats for the STP-, and you said they were for a mission. Absolutely. Those were the CubeSats for the STP-2 mission that is about to launch here in hopefully three hours or so.

We integrated a total of nine different PPODs, one of which was LightSail, which is in Prox1, so it actually wasn't in the cabinet when you were there. So there are eight PPODs in the cabinet, and inside those 8 P-pods were 11 separate CubeSats. So 12 payloads, which is half of the 24 that are on this big rocket, which with any luck, in not more than a couple of hours, we're going to see lift off. Exactly. So all 12 of those came to the Cal Poly clean room. The various spacecraft manufacturers either flew or shipped their CubeSats out, and we helped put them in the dispensers, do the final test, make sure they're all good to fly. And then we held on to them for, you know, maybe a few weeks while you were there.

You got to see them locked safely away. And then when it came time, they were shipped out to here, to the Cape, to be integrated. It wasn't long ago that we had a LightSail 2 preview. Talked with my colleagues Jason Davis and Bruce Betts and Bruce talked about the communication network how we will talk to and command LightSail 2 and he told us that's going to be directed from your facility. That's correct. So we've been operating, I'd say, sort of a current generation of satellite architecture since about 2015. We started overhauling our ground software to make it more flexible, to be able to accommodate more than one tracking station, things like that. What they're referring to there is that we're going to basically be using the Cal Poly software,

which is already set up to be able to accommodate multiple stations. It helps with having Purdue, Georgia Tech, and Kauai Community College, right, provide some tracking support for LightSail 2. So they sort of seamlessly integrate. It also provides the ability to do some automation. So once we get past sort of the really critical events where we want a bunch of eyes on the data, and we're just to the point where we want a bunch of eyes on the data, and we're just to the point where we're even potentially downloading pictures, things that you don't have to really have somebody awake at 3 in the morning to do. We can leverage some of the automation that we have in place to streamline the operations from that standpoint as well.

Dave Spencer, who is in the room with us here, as we wait to take the bus out to where we're going to watch the launch, he's, of course, as you know, the Lights Hill project manager. He said, no, he didn't feel bad today about the launch. He'll be more anxious when the time comes for Lights Hill 2 to come out of Prox 1 and deploy its antenna. You're smiling. You feel the same? Yes. And I'm smiling for a couple of reasons. One, at this point, we have absolutely no control over what's going to happen. So it's not worth

anyone's nerves worrying about it, right? So that's the first thing. The second thing is that at this point, I've seen so many launches and I've been involved in a number of them. And you just sort of know what to expect and you don't get too worked up over this aspect of what's going on. When it comes to operations, I'm sure there will be a lot more anxiety and anxious moments. And I'm sure your listeners will be able to hear about it from you and read about it from Jason, just like they did with LightSail 1. With any luck, by the time they hear this, LightSail 2 will be out there and maybe not

deployed, but at least we'll know that it's on orbit where it's supposed to be. For sure. Thank you, John, and I'm glad to be able to share this with you tonight. Thank you, Matt. It's always fun. John Bilardo of the Cal Poly SLO CubeSat Research Lab. Our bus took us across the open fields and beautiful wetlands of the Kennedy Space Center that are teeming with life, past the imposing Vehicle Assembly Building

that is being prepared for the Space Launch System rocket, finally pulling up in front of the Saturn V Center. We climbed the steps to a conference room with a balcony that looked out on the launch pad four miles away. Here is where we would stay as the countdown clock ticked down to zero. Joining us was yet another of the principal contributors on the LightSail team, a woman who is responsible for much of the software that would enable LightSail 2 to reach its goals. I'm Barbara Plant, and I'm the president of Boreal Space.

But I have been involved with the Planetary Society and the LightSail program since December of 2013. This is the culmination of that many years of work, and I'm just really excited about being at the KSC tonight. And hopefully we launch and we're off on another spectacular mission. You and I have talked a few times over the years. You also have been in on the evolution of this spacecraft, and I think especially what the software, right? And there were some substantial developments. There was a lot that had to happen before LightSail 1 and since LightSail 1, right? That's correct. there was a pretty massive overhaul of the attitude control algorithm dave spencer and i talked about making some improvements after the light sail one mission

and necessitated some overhaul of the flight software that glues the attitude control algorithm into the overall flight software. With that came a massive amount of testing of the the sensors and the actuators on LightSail. We found issues with magnetometers that were reporting magnetic fields that were impossible so we had to go ahead and calibrate them. We've really plumbed the depths of the system. We understand it very well now. We've encountered three or four different operational readiness tests. We've walked through the launch procedure several times and I'm feeling very confident about our executing that

nominal path. Whatever happens that's not nominal, just like LightSail 1, we'll go back in and we'll take it on and we'll figure out what to do. Were you also in on the addition of these sort of timer or clock functions that will cause the spacecraft to basically reboot if other things don't happen? That was Alex Diaz and John Bilardo. My major concern is with the attitude control system

and that once the system does reboot, all of the nominal functions are put back in place. Let's say if we are in the z-axis alignment mode and we reboot, we will reboot back into the z-axis alignment mode and not into de-tumble or some other mode. So reinforcing the current state of the spacecraft after a reboot is really more my concern. We have a very specialized spacecraft. There aren't a whole lot of solar sail CubeSats out there. But is some of the software work that has been done on LightSail, is this going to help other people who want to put small sats up above Earth and maybe beyond? I certainly think that the software infrastructure that exists within LightSail can be propagated to other 3U, 6U CubeSats.

And it might not be a bad idea to offer it out as something on GitHub or some proven on-orbit software that universities can use. They don't have to reinvent the wheel. And I think that would be a great legacy for LightSail. I've been told that the people from NASA's NEA Scout project, Near Earth Asteroid Project, also a solar sail, have been staying in real close touch. They have been. Certainly during LightSail 1, I was in really, really close touch

with the folks at Marshall. And they were so, so helpful and really right there asking questions and delivering information and commenting on the different sensors that we had and what their experience was with those sensors. I think maybe we'll also benefit from some laser ranging activities. We've got those retroreflectors on light sail and it would be really, really great to bounce a laser off them once or twice because it starts to make people think that something like Breakthrough Starshot is a real option. It's a real opportunity, something that we can make happen in our lifetimes. And that could be a legacy that could take us to the stars.

I can't believe that such a project like Breakthrough has actually manifested in my lifetime. It's so exciting, and it's one of many reasons that I'm so, so thrilled to have been working on LightSail. We've got a pretty good group up here waiting for the launch, but not very many people, just a handful of you, who get to wear this polo shirt that says Mission Team with that great mission patch. It sounds like it feels pretty good i feel very proud it's very special to walk amongst these people they represent various aspects of what's going on in the in

the planetary society but there are a few of us today here that struggled through ORTs, operational readiness tests, and testing and coding. We have a pretty good bond. I see these people and I'm just, I smile. I'm always so happy to see them. We are a very tight-knit team. And I feel that success will be ours with LightSail, too. Thank you, Barbara. It's good to talk to you again. My pleasure. Always a pleasure. That was Barbara Plant of Boreal Space. More hours passed. The countdown continued. I took my place next to Bill Nye on that balcony. Below us and beside us were many more space fans anxiously awaiting a launch that could still be scrubbed at any moment.

It was approaching 2 30 in the morning when I started talking with Bill only to be surprised by the appearance of a small green life form that had somehow made it to our balcony high above the ground. We're minutes away from really what's the start of a mission, but that has been years in coming. That's exactly right, Dr. Kaplan, yes. I've been messing with this as the CEO my entire tenure, nine years I've been working on this, and as a board member, certainly since 1999, we've been dealing with this. And so we're... He was chilling on my leg, but now he got scared.

Oh, was that a frog? Yeah, super cute. So there are amphibians making their way up here onto the balcony. We're three stories off the ground, and a frog jumped up on people, and there's some frog handlers who seem to be having an enjoyable interaction. Life finds a way. Well, you know, the frog's excited about the launch, like everybody else. That was an unexpected interloper as we are at, let's see,

T-minus 14 minutes and counting. Might be 13. Yeah. So we're on the balcony at the Saturn V Center, and we have an excellent view. Another thing that just adds to the scene is the moon has risen. Another thing that just adds to the scene is the moon has risen. I'd say, estimating it's 15 degrees above the horizon, and it just adds to the drama from our vantage point.

It's rocket in the lower left, moon in the upper right. It's just spectacular. With binoculars, well now with the naked eye, you can see the venting on the left side of the rocket from where we're standing, and that's the gas above the cryogenic, the very, very cold liquid oxygen. So this is an exciting time, man. It's going to be something else. Twenty-seven engines all lit at the same time, carrying this way the heck up into the sky. carrying this way the heck up into the sky.

As you look below us here, I mean, I can see hundreds of people from our vantage point, but I imagine there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands up and down the coast. And what this says about the excitement that can still be generated by an event like this. Well, you say still, but maybe more than ever, like this? Well, you say still, but maybe more than ever, because everybody's rooting for SpaceX and Blue Origin and the private companies who are accomplishing these remarkable things with a vision. We're going to reuse the cores or the boosters in an effort to save costs, in an effort to have more launches, get more spacecraft on orbit. And then the goal is to assemble things on orbit and then go farther and deeper into space. Mars, Europa, other extraordinary destinations.

And so we're part of this. And the solar sail is this innovative type of propulsion using nothing but sunlight. And we're very hopeful that it's going to work. We've had four years to refine the software and make sure the hardware works well. We've got the momentum wheel to tack just like a sailboat. The analogy is almost perfect where the solar sail spacecraft tacks like a sailboat in the wind.

It's really amazing. And for people unfamiliar, there is the solar wind, which these charged particles would stream off of stars like our sun, but that's about a hundredth of the momentum of the light itself. So it's really all about photons. It's relativity. Photons have no rest mass, but they still are pure energy and they have momentum. It's amazing. The whole thing's amazing. It's going to be very exciting. Moments to go. What you're about to hear is my only slightly compressed recording of what unfolded before us.

I think it's one of the most exciting and dramatic pieces of audio I've ever been able to present on planetary radio. pieces of audio I've ever been able to present on planetary radio. It's not just the launch that you'll witness, but the return of the Falcon Heavy's two side boosters. Here we go. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yeah! So they just turned out the lights below us here where people are on the grass. Yes, they just turned out the lights so our view is so much better. The lights below us. So now the pad 39A is lit up very very easy for us to see here on the Saturn 5 viewing building and you can feel that little bit of a

hush, a little bit of a hush and so down on the monitor below us we'll have speed of light countdown we won't we won't have delay. So that'll be really good. And you guys, it's for Bruce and it's for Lou Friedman. None of us would be here without Lou Friedman. He literally wrote the book. And Bruce Murray believed in this thing from the get-go. This is Mitch Durkin. Go for lunch.

Go for launch. Go for launch. So there's all sorts of automated things that have to go in sequence. We'll all do this together I'm sure. Here we go. 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, one. Yes! Ignition! Can you feel the light way over here? Go LightSail! Go LightSail! Oh man, it's beautiful! And the sky is a haze and it's just glowing. Look at this. Woo! Go, light sail! Passing the moon! And now the sound will reach us just now, four miles away. Feel it.

Wow. Feel it. You can feel it on your clothing and your hat. Feel it. Hat, you can feel it on your clothing and your hat. Feel it. Your hat, you can feel it on your hair. Take it from me. Wow. Go LightSail! Wow.

We're oxidizing. Higher and higher. It's just going perfectly. It's going, even from here, you can see the three cores, the three separate groups of engines. Oh, man. And those are the diamond shocks. Wow.

Fantastic. Oh, man. Everything's going just perfectly. Look at that. We're going to make it, you guys. You can see the smoke trails. Wow, look at the ring of smoke. So everybody, stay tuned.

You're going to see the flames from the boosters coming down. It's just amazing. Woo! There they are. Oh, there they are. Look at that. And now in a few seconds, there'll be the sonic booms going through all this atmosphere to us. It's amazing.

Wow. Oh, man. There they are. See it separating? Even from here you can see it. Wow. Nicely done, SpaceX! What's happening exactly right there?

The two boosters are coming off the center. They're separating from each other. I mean, at night, it's just so striking. It's just amazing. It's magical. So, I'm the CEO. I've been messing with this since a little before I took over, getting finances squared away,

$7 million funded by 50,000 supporters around the world, and we are on our way. funded by 50,000 supporters around the world. And we are on our way. It's just so gratifying. I can just, can you still see? I can just still see it. Way downrange. Can you see it, Matt?

Yes. Barely. Barely, yeah. And there's a lot of light from the SpaceX video and the moon, and we have these safety lights up here. I can't see it now, can you? No. I just, yeah, it's gone. So the rocket would be enough, but with everything else involved, the citizen science elements, the fact that it's a private company, the fact that a government, a nation is also behind this.

Investing our intellect and treasure. You say humanity at its best. It really is. We solve problems that have never been solved before. We learn more about the cosmos and our place within it. And we work our way to answering those two deep questions. Where did we come from? Where did we all come from?

And are we alone in the cosmos? Are we alone? This is part of answering those questions. So I'm starting, my vision's relaxed enough now, I'm starting to see stars in the background. But pretty soon, we hope to see the flames of the boosters. And the mood just hangs there serenely. I know, it has nothing better to do.

But it's... Thank you, Jackson. Thank you so much. Beautiful. There we go. There, there they are. Wow, wow, there they are, two of them. And you can see the clusters of engines. Nicely done, SpaceX!

So then they coast for a little bit and they light the engines again. And I say coast, they're falling from the sky, from miles up, kilometers up. This is rocket science, people. Yes, I glimmer. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. There, yes! There's two of them! Yes! Yes! Wow, we have a great position here. Wow, we can see it all the way Wow and then watch the monitor everybody look at the monitor for the completion The orange glow in the distance and now we see the final few meters on the There it comes. Wow. Nicely done. Everyone, I want to thank you all for your support.

This is yours, folks. Thank you so much. You have Sonic Boom. Wow. Wow. The Sonic Boom the United States. The President of the United States. The President of the United States. The President of the United States.

The President of the United States. The President of the United States. The President of the United States. The President of the United States. The President of the United States. The President of the United States. The President of the United States. The President of the United States. delivered in such a short time to put our spacecraft with the others on orbit. My goodness.

Thank you all so much. Thanks for coming from Australia, you crazy kids. Thank you. Minutes later, as we were almost literally still basking in the golden glow of that glorious launch, I saw Planetary Society board member Robert Picardo talking with LightSail project and mission manager Dave Spencer. You'll hear Bob before I talk with Dave. Congratulations. That was pretty exciting.

I've never seen anything like it, and the sound was something I've never heard before. That was amazing. I just, I mean, people describe the sound. Feeling the pressure against your chest. Yeah, it was just exciting. Really happy to be here. My first launch, it will not be my last.

You got a spacecraft, if not in orbit, almost in orbit. Can't wait. Can't wait. So, yeah, in about an hour, Prox-1 is going to separate from the launch vehicle upper stage. It's going to float freely in space for a week. And then LightSail will be ejected from Prox One exactly seven days after the time the Prox One turns on. And that's when we really go to work. That's when we look for the radio signal from LightSail. That's nervous time for me. This is fun. That's work.

Not just, I mean, it was fun, but pretty damn thrilling. Oh, it is thrilling. Just an amazing sight and just an amazing feeling. I mean, it's just the noise, the power, and this night launch. I mean, just the brightness is just overwhelming. Lights up the whole sky. So it was a fantastic experience. Really happy to be here.

And it's great to be with all these supporters of the Planetary Society. We'll be checking in. Okay. Thanks, Matt. Bob Picardo and Dave Spencer. It was now nearing 3.30 a.m. on Tuesday, June 25th. Most of us had been awake for nearly 24 hours, but you wouldn't have been able to tell from the still electric enthusiasm in the room.

People had come from all over the world to witness this launch and celebrate LightSail. My last conversation of the morning was with a couple who had come farther than almost anyone else. I'm Gerald from Vienna, Austria. I'm Isabel Cajon from Austria, Vienna. And when did you decide to make this trip?

Five days ago, something. Five, four days, yeah. Was it worth it? A thousand times. It was so amazing. Would do it again. Oh my God. In a heartbeat.

Yes. Describe what you saw. Light. It was so bright. It was just perfect. I mean like even the moon was there perfectly. Top right side of the launch complex and then just the boosters. I mean a Falcon Heavy at night. It's like three boosters. Two of them coming back. Like the flashes. I mean actually I learned something. Next time I'll bring sunglasses for the start and the beginning because then you don't have a green spot in your eye for the rest of the flight. So it will be a next time. Do you feel that way too? Of course. We'll do it again. Thank you, folks. We were honored to have you with us. We were honored to be here.

Thank you for having us. It was such a great opportunity. Go LightSail! My special coverage of the Falcon Heavy launch ends there, but this was merely the beginning for LightSail. Just over a week has passed as we record this. It was with some anxiety that I got out of bed on the morning of Tuesday, July 2nd. I knew that perhaps the most critical moment in LightSail 2's journey

should have taken place a few hours before. The news arrived in an email message from LightSail program manager Bruce Betts, who joins us now. Welcome, Bruce. Thank you, Matt. Tell me what you put in that email and what is now also public across the net. We received a signal from LightSail 2. Yay! So as you may have discussed in the show, LightSail 2 was inside the Georgia Tech Prox-1 spacecraft for one week.

It then popped out and booted up and deployed its antenna. And we waited anxiously that that happened to occur while it was during a pass over Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where I am right now, and where our mission control is. And we were able to, we weren't sure we'd get a signal in that first pass, but we did. So we know the spacecraft is deployed, and the antenna is deployed, and it's booted up and it's functioning and we'll be looking for more passes to get more spacecraft information. But the key thing is LightSail 2 is out and flying. We've got an operational spacecraft. Yay! Jason Davis, our colleague, said,

it's gone so well he's waiting for the other shoe to drop. Shouldn't something have gone wrong by now? I mean, everything really couldn't be much better, right? Everything's good so far. There's lots more, but everything's good. And hopefully, we've done an awful lot of testing of what we could test on the ground. So I'm hoping that pays off in flight. What is just ahead? A few days of getting tracking passes, information, checking out the health of the spacecraft, running some tests on the momentum wheel and attitude control system. And then if all is good,

in a few days, we'll deploy the solar panels that open up, and then we'll do more testing, including taking some pictures. Then if all is good, we will deploy the solar sail and start into solar sailing mode. What will tell us that this has been a successful mission? Our ultimate goal is to prove that we, in this small spacecraft, we can shove a solar sail in there, deploy it, and do controlled solar sailing. And the way we will test that is by changing our orbit using only solar pressure. The key thing is tracking the orbit. That will be done in various ways, including the Air Force just naturally tracking stuff in space.

And then also the International Laser Ranging Service has agreed to shoot lasers and try to get an exact orbit even faster by reflecting them off the corner cubes, the mirror reflectors we've included on the spacecraft. But one way or the other, it'll take days to weeks to change the orbit enough to see it and to demonstrate that, even if all goes well. So far, so fantastic.

You're going to be up there for a while, I hear. Yeah, at least a week or two as we co-locate the team here in San Luis Obispo during the key events. And then we'll all go back to home institutions and do things electronically. But for now, we're up here. Tell us, other than light sail, what's up in the night sky? Well, until we get a sail out, you're not going to be able to see light sail. But what you can see is Jupiter looking quite stunning, rising, and it's already up in the east in the early evening, brighter than any star-like object up there.

And Saturn is just about at opposition, so opposite side of the Earth from the sun, meaning it's going to be rising in the east around sunset and setting around sunrise, looking yellowish. It's down below Jupiter in the sky. And we've also got a partial lunar eclipse on July 16th. The eclipse will be visible for most of Europe, Africa, Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean. We move on to this week in space history. A lot of action, particularly on July 4th in history. 1997, Pathfinder landed on Mars.

2005, Deep Impact slammed into a comet. 2016, Juno began orbiting Jupiter. And of course, in 1054 AD, the crab nebula, or the supernova that led to the crab nebula was first observed. Big day. We move on to random space fact. That was sort of Central California cool. Hey, it's all solar sail all the time right now.

So our solar sail material is four and a half micron thick, rather thin mylar. And to make sure it doesn't accidentally rip in some way, we've got threads woven into it called rip stops that if a hole did start or a rip did stop, start, sorry, it would stop. So yay, way to rip stop. Just like my camping tent. Exactly. That's where we took the idea from.

Thank you, Matt. You're welcome. All right. We move on to the trivia question. And I asked you, from what type of spacecraft will the Cosmic 2 set of spacecraft, launched with LightSail 2, receive signals from? Confusing, perhaps, question. But how did we do, Matt?

It was a nice response. There were a bunch of these satellites that got launched along with LightSail. Six. Yeah, six of the 24 payloads on that rocket. Chris Robson, who's an Australian listener to Planetary Radio, I'm glad you were able to go down there just recently to scout this out before Chris could win. Yes, we didn't want an Australian winner until I'd been there. No, we've had them before, but I went to New Zealand and Australia, and I just have to say before you get to the trivia contest, your sky is beautiful. I've never seen it before.

It's gorgeous. And the places I was, we saw a lot of good Milky Way, which of course we can see some of from up here, but also got to, for the first time, see Alpha Centauri and the Southern Cross and all sorts of good stuff. Do you see the Magellanic Clouds? No, I tried, but they were lower down and in the foggy fuzz. Most days were cloudy. So no, that'll be on a list for the future. I was lucky. I did catch them that time I was down in Chile. And we should say that this was a trip that you had planned months ago with your sons and didn't want to miss it. But here you are back at the center of action for the real action that's taking place with LightSail 2 right now.

Indeed. Now back to the trivia contest. Chris Robson, that fellow in Australia, he submitted the answer, the correct answer, GPS satellites. That's where the Cosmic 2 satellites are going to get their signals from as they check out to learn more about Earth's atmosphere. He's got that right, doesn't he? He does.

It's very clever. So you've got all these GPS satellites already transmitting. So these spacecraft look for the signals coming through the atmosphere. From that, they can extract information about water vapor within pressure and temperature with altitude. Occultation. Chris, you have won yourself a priceless Planetary Society kick asteroid, rubber asteroid, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account,

and a really great book, an inspiring book, Heroes of the Space Age by Rod Pyle. Beautifully illustrated book. Congratulations, Chris. As you might expect, we have some other stuff as well. Joseph Ladd in Boulder City, Nevada. He says, I visited Planetary HQ last month while in town for the JPL open house.

He caught a glimpse of the elusive Bruce Betts, but was too timid to shout, hey, Bruce. I regret it to this day. Maybe next time. Next time. Next time, shout, hey, Bruce. I regret it to this day. Maybe next time. Next time. Next time, shout, hey, Bruce. Right in line with that from Bob Klain. Help, help.

I've been occulted by standing in the shadow of greater men than I, you and Bruce. Best wishes for a successful voyage of the starship LightSail 2. We got a lot of really nice thoughts and wishes wishes uh on behalf of light sail to and uh and our team which that's so nice just one more dave fairchild our poet laureate of course cosmic two will listen to some signals with finesse that come from all those satellites we know as gps and with this occultation data they will overhear, we will learn a lot about our planet's atmosphere. Nice. Yeah, I enjoyed it.

We are ready for the next one, I think, and wait till you hear about the special prize. Cool. Well, as I said, it's all light sail all the time now. So tell me, I mean, I already know, but tell everyone, what are the four formal tracking station locations for LightSail 2, our four ground stations we're using? Don't have to give latitude and longitude.

Just give locations of the facilities in some other way. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Should be easy to discover. Should be easy to discover, and you have a strong incentive to get us your answer by Wednesday, July 10th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. Here's why. Not only will you have a chance for a 200-point itelescope.net account, that worldwide network of telescopes, including a bunch in the Southern Hemisphere because they're based down there. But how about this? A special little donation from our good friend, Liam Kennedy, the inventor of ISS Above, this little device that you can hold in your hand. It's self-contained, but you can also plug it into a monitor and it actually tells you when the International Space Station is going to be flying over your head, so you can run out and take a look.

And it does much more. If you have the monitor, it has a great feed of all kinds of stuff from NASA, all about the ISS and other stuff. But now, wait, wait till you hear this. It is not just ISS above. It will soon also be light sail above because he is programming into it. Liam is the orbital. What would you say? Coordinates for light sail, too, so that you'll also be able to once those sails are deployed and you might be able to see it from Earth, even with the naked eye, if we're lucky, you can go out and check it out.

It's a great little device, and I can tell you it's quite a nice package. If you don't want to wait to see if you can win one, you can also go to issabove.com. And if you use the word lightsale as a promo code, Liam will give you 10% off. That'll be our big grand prize, light sale related, for this brand new contest. I'd normally say it's time to go, Bruce, but would you say a word or two about some other good news that we got just in the last few days about PlanetVac? Yeah, it's a big week for planetary society projects the honeybee robotics project planet vac which we've funded different aspects of and you've had radio shows about over the last few years a surface sampling device and technique has been selected by nasa to fly to the

moon and select and sample some lunar regoliths. So congratulations to Chris Zachney and Honeybee Robotics and congratulations to all of the Planetary Society members and donors who made this happen. So go PlanetFac and go light sail. Now we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about what your favorite time zone is. I have no idea which one I'm in right now. Thank you. And good night. It's whatever one I'm in at the moment.

And that's the same one that Bruce Betts is in right now. He is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, checking in with us from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where they will shortly be doing much more with LightSail 2, including the unfurling of its big silvery sails. You probably know this, but you can get LightSail 2 updates from the Society's Twitter feed at ExplorePlanets. And you can keep an eye on Planetary.org, where we've got tons of great stuff about the mission. Lastly, you can hear our special mission briefing for members who came to Florida for the launch.

It was as much a celebration as a briefing featuring Bill Nye and yours truly as MC. It's on this week's show page that you'll find at planetary.org slash radio. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by our Light Sailing members. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Go Light Sail!