Since we can’t send anyone into space to reboot LightSail, we may have to wait for the spacecraft to reboot on its own. Spacecraft are susceptible to charged particles zipping through deep space, many of which get trapped inside Earth’s magnetic field. If one of these particles strikes an electronics component in just the right way, it can cause a reboot. This is not an uncommon occurrence for CubeSats, or even larger spacecraft, for that matter. Cal Poly’s experience with CubeSats suggest most experience a reboot in the first three weeks; I spoke with another CubeSat team that rebooted after six. Coincidentally, this is close to the original 28-day sail deployment timeline.

Radio operators

A lot of amateur radio enthusiasts have been helping to track LightSail. Many of you have sent in data packets that you’ve received, and I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how to decode packet contents. First of all, thank you! The first operator to grab a full packet was Ken Swaggart (call sign W7KKE) from Lincoln City, Oregon. His packet was nabbed at 20:01 UTC on May 20—just five hours after launch.

This is a test flight in more ways than one. In addition to figuring out how LightSail behaves in space, we’re also refining our procedures for getting information out to the public—including the radio community. Because the team has been busy with actual spacecraft operations, I’ve been trying to field those inquiries myself. Unfortunately, I’m far from an expert in this area. I know what the data should look like after they are decoded; not so much on the raw radio signal side of things.

We don’t currently have a public decoder available, but Dr. John Bellardo at Cal Poly generously spent some time building a prototype web version that takes raw hexidecimal data and converts it to plain text. I’ve tried using it to decode some of the packets you’ve sent me, but to no avail thus far—meaning I have to send them over to our engineers instead. The team’s first duty is to the spacecraft itself, but we’ll get to your requests eventually, and iron out the process for our 2016 flight. In the meantime, you can still listen for LightSail and send reports to [email protected] For more details, check out our Mission Control page at sail.planetary.org/missioncontrol.

Finally, many folks have written in to tell me that our spacecraft ground track is getting stale. We know, and we’re just as anxious as you are to get that updated. We rely on JSpOC, the Joint Space Operations Center, for updated Two-Line Element sets. TLEs are numerical descriptions of an object’s orbit. Thus far, our only TLE came from the launch vehicle shortly after LightSail was deposited into orbit.

When we get a new TLE, we expect there to be several that represent the entire group of CubeSats that hitched a ride to space aboard the Atlas V Centaur upper stage. Since the spacecraft remain bunched relatively close together, there might not be discrete one-to-one matches between each TLE and its corresponding spacecraft. One way we can narrow down which spacecraft is LightSail is to measure its doppler shift, but since we're no longer transmitting, the process may take more time.