The Planetary Society

flag designs intended to be used on Mars, or simply representing the planet

American non-profit research society

solar sail project

LightSail is a project to demonstrate controlled solar sailing within low Earth orbit using a CubeSat. The project was developed by The Planetary Society, a global non-profit organization devoted to space exploration. It consists of two spacecraft — LightSail 1 and LightSail 2. LightSail 1 was an engineering demonstration mission designed to test its new sail deployment method in space, it did not perform solar sailing. LightSail 2 was a fully functional spacecraft intended to demonstrate true solar sailing and incorporated the lessons learned from LightSail 1. LightSail is a follow-on project