Planetary Society ready to launch LightSail 2 solar sail

The Planetary Society’s solar sailing CubeSat (Lightsail2) has been installed into a spring-loaded deployer, and that deployer was bolted to the Prox-1 spacecraft. It was a double integration; basically they put a box inside a box inside a box.

Lightsail 2 has a momentum wheel to help maintain position in space. It has new attitude determination and control software. The cameras were upgraded to transmit higher-quality images of the sails.

There are timers on board with automatic settings to restart processes or to reboot the entire spacecraft. More technical status information will be sent back to mission controllers. Reflectors were added to make it easier to track from the ground.