After spending more than 240 days "sailing" around the Earth, NASA's NanoSail-D has successfully completed its Earth orbiting mission.
NanoSail-D is slowly descending after successfully orbiting the Earth's upper atmosphere since deploying its sail on Jan. 20.
NASA has formed a partnership with Spaceweather.com to engage the amateur astronomy community to submit the best images of the orbiting NanoSail-D solar sail.
Engineers at the Marshall Center confirmed that the NanoSail-D nanosatellite successfully deployed its 100-square-foot polymer sail in low-Earth orbit and is operating as planned.
On Jan. 19, NASA engineers confirmed that the NanoSail-D nanosatellite has ejected from the FASTSAT satellite.