Dear Colleagues,
As Outreach Coordinator to Ireland for The Planetary Society (TPS) (co-founded by Carl Sagan), I'm delighted to bring to your attention an exciting space mission launching today.
Today at 4.05pm Irish time TPS will launch a test mission called Lightsail - a spacecraft with a thin milar sail of area 32 square-metres that will literally be pushed through space by sunlight (that is - by the momentum of photons pushing the sail, not using solar power)
This is the first of two missions. This 30 day mission is a test flight to test all systems, with the main mission (using another identical solar sail spacecraft) to be launched by Space-X on our behalf in 2016.
For the 2016 mission, if you would like to send a "selfie" into space, you can upload it at:
www.planetary.org/get-involved/messages/...ubmit-your-name.html
You can view today's launch at:
www.ulalaunch.com/webcast.aspx
And you can monitor the progress of Lightsail over the next 30 days (and indeed next year's more significant launch) at:
www.planetary/org
and
sail.planetary.org
Thanks for your attention on this.
Kind regards,
Kevin.
  