A new £15,000,000 NASA spacecraft is tumbling aimlessly through space after hitting a snag in a test flight.
Solar sails half the size of a tennis court should harness the pressure of sunlight to propel the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3), currently in earth’s orbit.
If they’re proved successful, they may be rolled out as the new propulsion system on larger spacecraft.
But when the US space agency unfurled them, engineers noticed one of the four booms the sails are attached to had a ‘slight bend’.
‘This likely occurred as the booms and sail were pulled taut to the spacecraft during deployment’, NASA said.
Now the vessel is tumbling with no steering because its attitude control system – which controls its orientation – was turned off before the sails were unfurled in August.
This was done ‘to accommodate the spacecraft’s changing dynamics as the sail unfurled’, NASA said.
A previous attempt to unfurl them was aborted after the solar sail paused due to an onboard power monitor detecting higher than expected currents.
ACS3’s attitude control system will be reactivated when the vessel passes above NASA’s ground station.
At this point, it can point its high-bandwidth radio antenna down, allowing the ground team to gather data necessary to calibrate the shape of the sails and prepare it for the sailing maneuvers it is there to test.
NASA said: ‘Data collected from this flight test has already proven highly valuable, and the demonstration will continue producing critical information to enable future solar sail missions.
‘The mission team predicts the slight bend in one of the four booms will not inhibit the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System’s ability to execute its sailing maneuvers later in the technology demonstration.’
NASA has run into problems with other spacecraft this year.
Two astronauts who went to space for eight days in June will finally come home next year.
A new Boeing capsule that took them up to the International Space Station proved too faulty to take them back down safely.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX capsule will deliver them instead.
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