LightSail 2 captured this image of Madagascar and part of Mozambique on June 11, 2022. In Low Earth Orbit the wings of a giant loaf of bread-sized spacecraft have been sailing on the sun for the past three years.

Solar sails enabled LightSail 2 to exceed its life expectancy and provide proof that they can be used as spacecraft sails. As Earth's atmosphere pulls the spacecraft down, its journey around our planet is, unfortunately, coming to an end. Flame in the atmosphere.

After a month, LightSail 2 launched by the Planetary Society opens its 344 square feet (32 square meters) solar sail. LightSail reached an altitude of 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) within two weeks of spreading its wings, making this an extremely successful experiment.

However, LightSail 2 has been losing height modifications at an increasingly fast rate over the last few months. According to the Planetary Society, it has sailed at 390 miles (627 kilometers) per hour, down from 446 miles (718 kilometers) at the beginning of the mission.

This is what the spacecraft will look like during re-entry. Soon it will create a pressure wave in front of it, which will cause the air around it to heat, burning LightSail in a flaming shroud.

Photons from the sun are accelerated by solar sails, creating tiny bursts of momentum that propel the spacecraft away from the sun as they collide with LightSail's wings. It would likely reach extremely high altitudes if the spacecraft could bypass the clouds from Earth's atmosphere.

You gain and lose some altitude in orbit. Sometimes you lose a few meters of altitude per day. Despite circumnavigating the Earth for three years, the experimental device seems to have experienced a steep decline as a result of several factors.

Atmospheric resistance was caused by the increasing density of the atmosphere as the spacecraft went down. Spacecrafts also slow down when their sails crash into the atmosphere, traveling at speeds approaching 20,000 mph (32000 km / h)

'Our sail is so large compared to the mass of the spacecraft that it is more extreme than most spacecraft,' the Planetary Society said in a statement. Throwing a stone is like throwing a piece of paper compared to throwing a stone.

Unlike rocks, paper is much faster to stop by the force of atmospheric drag.'LightSail 2 was also hampered by the Sun. With the sun at its most active, Earth's upper atmosphere expands to higher altitudes as the temperature rises.

Consequently, the atmosphere has become more intense at higher altitudes until it reaches LightSail 2, causing the spacecraft to be pulled down. The final reason for LightSail's demise has more to do with the individual than with the global.

The legacy of LightSail 2 will live on, even if it is destroyed in a collision. In addition to testing sail material in Earth orbit, NASA expects to launch a solar cruiser in 2025. Solar sails are fast approaching the age of enlightenment.