The Planetary Society's crowdfunded solar-sailing CubeSat, LightSail 2, launched on June 25th 2019, and two years later, the mission is still going strong. A pioneering technology demonstration of solar sail capability, LightSail 2 uses the gentle push of photons from the Sun to maneuver and adjust its orbital trajectory. Within months of its launch, LightSail 2 had already been declared a success, breaking new ground and expanding the possibilities for future spacecraft propulsion systems. Since then, it's gone on to test the limits of solar sailing in an ongoing extended mission.

One of the primary goals of that extended mission is to try out the spacecraft in different modes of operation, learning along the way how to sail efficiently and effectively. Even though two years of flying in the harsh orbital environment has begun to degrade the sail, software updates, learned experience, and careful debugging efforts have ensured that LightSail 2 is still flying exceptionally well. Shrinkage, crinkles, and delamination need to be continually monitored, but in spite of them, the team reports that LightSail 2's current "orbit decay rates…are the lowest we've seen since the early days of the mission.