NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NASA's Nanosail-D 'Sails' Home -- Mission Complete

NanoSail-D Over Leiden, the Netherlands (Credit/copyright: Marco Langbroek) After spending more than 240 days "sailing" around the Earth, NASA's NanoSail-D -- a nanosatellite that deployed NASA's first-ever solar sail in low-Earth orbit -- has successfully completed its Earth orbiting mission. Launched to space Nov. 19, 2010 as a payload on NASA's FASTSAT, a small satellite, NanoSail-D's sail deployed on Jan. 20. The research team continues to analyze the orbital data to determine how future satellites can use this new technology.

› Feature
› View Flickr Slideshow

NASA's ability to rapidly develop and launch ground-breaking technologies into space just got more efficient and less expensive. NASA is pulling together engineers and scientist from across the country to develop and fly very small satellites, also called nanosatellites, in extremely short time frames. Small satellite missions provide NASA with valuable opportunities to test emerging technologies and economical commercial off-the-shelf components which may be useful in future space missions. Using small and very small satellites (weighing between 2-440 pounds) NASA can test innovative science and engineering technologies on a smaller scale in the space environment and better understand how hardware will survive the radiation, temperature and vacuum conditions encountered in space. NASA nanosatellites are designed for a wide spectrum of space missions including biology experiments, testing advanced propulsion and communications technologies.