Description: Welcome
CubeSail, designed by CU Aerospace (Champaign-Urbana Aerospace) and the University of Illinois, is a low-cost flight experiment based on the UltraSail concept. This experiment uses two CubeSat satellites to deploy a 20 sq. meter solar sail, which can play the same role as propellant on a conventional spacecraft. A major advantage of a “propellantless” solar sail is that the need for a relatively massive and expensive propulsive device is avoided. CubeSail mission goals are successful sail deployment, attitu
Post-mortem for website
“It is with great regret that we are officially calling an early end to the CubeSail mission, notably before we were ever able to deploy the solar sail. Satellite beacons at the correct frequency were observed post-launch once on 18 Dec. 2018, but not with sufficient signal to noise ratio to demodulate the call sign in the beacons. No further communications were received from CubeSail. After more than 2 years of continued efforts to establish full communication with CubeSail, we sadly came to the foregone c