Displaying items by tag: nanosail

NanoSail-D2 is a technology demonstration experiment of NASA with the primary objective to deploy a compact solar sail boom system in space.

In a previous attempt, a team from the NASA/MSFC, along with a team from the NASA/ARC (Ames Research Center), developed a solar sail mission called NanoSail-D which was lost in a launch failure aboard a Falcon 1 rocket on August 3, 2008.

Two units of the NanoSail-D satellites have been built. NASA/MSFC plans to launch the backup NanoSail-D payload from a 3U CubeSat (nanosatellite) of ARC on the FASTSat-HSV mission. FASTSat is required to launch the nanosatellite before the NanoSail-D2 payload can be launched and deployed from the nanosatellite.