CubeSail is a nano-scale flight experiment to demonstrate deployment and control of a single 250-meter solar sail blade as a low-cost risk reduction precursor of the advanced interplanetary UltraSail concept (four 5-kilometer blades with approximately 100,000 m2 of sail area). CubeSail was built by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and CU Aerospace, the same team that designed the I-Sail and UltraSail concepts funded by NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.
CubeSail represents an affordable stepping-stone towards the future development of the UltraSail solar sail concept that would enable very high-energy inner heliosphere and interstellar scientific missions.
Ten CubeSats on the Rocket Lab flight are launching as the 19th Educational Launch of NanoSatellites (ELaNa) mission through NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative.