Bill Nye's LightSail solar sailing spacecraft goes silent in orbit

A tiny spacecraft launched last week to test solar sail technology in orbit has stopped communicating with Earth.

The Planetary Society's tiny LightSail spacecraft, launched into orbit on May 20, was expected to unfurl and test its solar sails in June. However, the bread-loaf-sized cubesat hasn't sent any data to ground stations since May 22 at 5:31 p.m. ET, reported Jason Davis, digital editor for the Planetary Society, in a blog post earlier this week.

"It is now believed that a vulnerability in the software controlling the main avionics board halted spacecraft operations, leaving a reboot as the only remedy to continue the mission," Davis wrote.

The software glitch causes the flight system to crash once it collects more than 32 megabytes of data.

"The manufacturer of the avionics board corrected this glitch in later software revisions. ButLightSail's software version doesn't include the update."

Yesterday, Davistweeted that not much has changedsince the blog post.

The Planetary Society, headed by CEO Bill Nye, best known as "the science guy" from his popular TV show, is a non-profit space advocacy organization co-founded by the late astronomer Carl Sagan.

Its LightSail project is an effort to develop solar sailing, a technology that relies on ultra-thin reflective "sails" to capture the momentum from solar energy photons. The small, continuous acceleration allows a spacecraft propelled by solar sails to reach high speeds over time.

The recent launch isn't high enough to escape the Earth's atmospheric drag, but is a test designed to gather data for a 2016 flight in a higher orbit that will demonstrate "true solar sailing." The Planetary Society has an ongoing crowdfunding campaign to raise money for that mission.

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Davis said that because there is no one in space to reboot LightSail, "we may have to wait for the spacecraft to reboot on its own." That could happen if charged particles from deep space hit the spacecrafts electronics in"just the right way."That's common enough that similar spacecraft typically reboot within their first few weeks in space, Davis added.

Once the spacecraft is rebooted, the team hopes to deploy the solar sail manually as soon as possible.

The spacecraft is able to remain in orbit for about six months.

A decade ago, the Planetary Society'sattempt tolaunch the world's first solar sail was unsuccessfulafter the spacecraft failed to reach orbit.

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Five years later, the first solar sails were deployed by Japan's Venus-bound IKAROS spacecraft and NASA's NanoSail-D satellite in low-Earth orbit.

NASA has two upcoming solar sail missions, one to the moon and the other to an asteroid, scheduled for 2018.