NASA says solar sail satellite has deployed from FASTSAT (Huntsville Times)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Lee Roop, The Huntsville Times

HUNTSVILLE, AL - Engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center here say new data confirm that the NanoSail-D nanosatellite has ejected from the larger satellite that carried it into space.

The news partially reverses one of the biggest disappointments associated with NASA's Fast Affordable Scientific and Technology Satellite FASTSAT launched in December. FASTSAT was an attempt by NASA to launch an affordable platform for experiments in space.

One of the biggest of those experiments was NanoSail-D, a microsatellite containing a solar sail that was to eject from FASTSAT and then open in space. NASA had to announce two weeks later that NanoSail-D apparently never deployed.

But now it has. The ejection "occurred spontaneously" and was discovered this morning by engineers analyzing data sent down from FASTSAT. The launch has also been confirmed by ground-based radar.

NASA is asking amateur ham operators to listen for the signal to verify NanoSail-D is operating. This information should be sent to the NanoSail-D dashboard at: http://nanosaild.engr.scu.edu/dashboard.htm. The NanoSail-D beacon signal can be found at 437.270 MHz.
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more: http://blog.al.com/space-news/2011/01/nasa_says_solar_sail_satellite.html