of the Sun. NanoSail-D 2010 A team from the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (Marshall), along with a team from the NASA Ames Research Center, developed a solar sail mission called NanoSail-D, which was lost in a launch failure aboard a Falcon 1 rocket on 3 August 2008. The second backup version, NanoSail-D2, also sometimes called simply NanoSail-D, was launched with FASTSAT on a Minotaur IV on November 19, 2010, becoming NASA's first solar sail deployed in low earth orbit. The objectives of the mission were to test sail deployment technologies, and to gather data about the use of solar sails as a simple, "passive" means of de-orbiting dead satellites and space debris. The NanoSail-D structure was made of aluminium and plastic, with the spacecraft massing less than . The sail has about of light-catching surface. After some initial problems with deployment, the solar sail was deployed and over the course of its 240-day mission reportedly produced a "wealth of data" concerning the use of solar sails as passive deorbit devices. NASA launched the second NanoSail-D unit stowed inside the FASTSAT satellite on the Minotaur IV on November 19, 2010. The ejection date from the FASTSAT microsatellite was planned for December 6, 2010, but deployment only occurred on January 20, 2011. Planetary Society LightSail Projects On June 21, 2005, a joint private project between Planetary Society, Cosmos Studios and Russian Academy of Science launched a prototype sail Cosmos 1 from a submarine in the Barents Sea, but the Volna rocket failed, and the spacecraft failed to reach orbit. They intended to use the sail to gradually raise the spacecraft to a higher Earth orbit over a mission duration of one month. The launch attempt sparked public interest according to Louis Friedman. Despite the failed launch attempt of Cosmos 1, The Planetary Society received applause for their efforts from the space community and sparked a rekindled interest in solar sail technology. On Carl Sagan's 75th birthday (November 9, 2009) the Planetary Society announced plans to make three further attempts, dubbed LightSail-1, -2, and -3. The new design will use a 32 m2 Mylar sail, deployed in four triangular segments like NanoSail-D. The launch configuration is a 3U CubeSat format, and as of 2015, it was scheduled as a secondary payload for a 2016 launch on the first SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch. "LightSail-1" was launched on 20 May 2015. The purpose of