IKAROS: Successful sail deployment and solar power
generation! Hooray!!

JAXA finally issued the formal announcement: they successfully expanded IKAROS' square sail! Not only that, but the sail's thin-film solar cells are generating power! Hooray for JAXA and hooray for IKAROS! They haven't demonstrated actual solar sailing yet -- that's still to come, and may be weeks in the future -- but with today's announcement they've achieved their stated minimum success goals for the mission, so it's definitely time to ....

Read The Full Article:
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002541/

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