LightSail is a solar sail project developed by The Planetary Society, a global non-profit organization devoted to space exploration. LightSail is a three-unit CubeSat about the size of a loaf of bread. LightSail and Prox-1 will be released into an orbit with an altitude of 720 kilometers (450 miles), high enough to escape most of the planet’s atmospheric drag. Prox-1 will eject LightSail into open space. Later, it will assemble with LightSail and inspect it. When LightSail unfurls its solar sails, Prox-1 will be nearby to capture images of the big moment.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
