IKAROS Update... If there’s one thing to lighten my mood after the Lakers lost against the Celtics in Game 4 today (Will someone step on Nate Robinson and squash him already?), it’s that the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has successfully deployed the solar sail on the IKAROS spacecraft! Awesome! The deployment took place in two stages: The first stage deployment started around June 3rd and was completed yesterday, and the second stage deployment started right after that and was finished today. The IKAROS team has now achieved minimum mission success. Congratulations.
Full mission success will be achieved once IKAROS demonstrates that its sail can steer the spacecraft on its 6-month journey to the planet Venus. Hopefully that won’t be too difficult. Below are images taken by 4 monitoring cameras that are attached all around the spacecraft. The cameras photographed each corner of the sail membrane to make sure it unfurled properly on all sides. Click here to get an in-depth description of what you're looking at. IKAROS was 7.7 million kilometers (4.8 million miles) when this milestone occurred.
Source: IKAROS Mission Blog
CAMERA 1:
CAMERA 2:
CAMERA 3:
CAMERA 4:
All images courtesy of JAXA
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