Flight by Light: Mission accomplished for LightSail 2

Mission accomplished: the Planetary Society announced Wednesday that its LightSail 2 spacecraft, which was launched last month, had successfully raised its orbit using only the power of photons from the Sun.

The team behind the USD 7 million crowd-funded venture said they had demonstrated a proof of concept for a new form of propulsion that could one day transform deep space exploration by doing away with the need for expensive rockets and fuel.

"In the past four days the spacecraft has raised its apogee, or orbital high point, by about 1.7 kilometers (one mile) attributable to solar sailing," said Bruce Betts, LightSail 2 program manager.

That makes it the first spacecraft to use solar sailing for propulsion in Earth orbit, and the second-ever solar sail spacecraft to successfully fly, following Japan's IKAROS, which launched in 2010.

"This technology enables us to take things to extraordinary destinations in the solar system, and maybe even beyond, in a way that's never been possible because you don't need fuel and you don't need all the systems to control fuel," said Bill Nye, the chief executive of the Planetary Society.

He added he would like to see the technology applied to missions searching for life on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, and Saturn's moon Titan, and "solar sails could enable you to lower the cost of these missions."
The idea of solar sailing was first theorized in the 1600s by Johannes Kepler, who wrote that sails and ships "could be adapted to heavenly breezes."