Solar-Sail Spacecraft May Have Failed To Separate From Booster

What killed Cosmos 1? That question haunts Russian navy officials and members of the US-based Planetary Society, in the wake of the space vehicle's apparent destruction.

Cosmos-1 was the first-ever solar-sail spaceship, moving along on the solar wind -- faster and faster over long periods of time. But the joint US-Russian spaceship never got to unfurl its sail, instead crashing into the Barents Sea after being launched from a Soviet ballistic submarine on Tuesday.

In fact, the three-stage launch vehicle was a converted ICBM. But instead of a deadly nuclear warhead, the missile carried hopes for a technological breakthrough in space travel.

As ANN reported in real-time on Tuesday, the vehicle was lost 83-seconds after launch. Now, Russian officials say Cosmos 1 went down near Novaya Zemlya, an archipeligo that separates the Barents Sea from the Kara Sea.

Still, Planetary Society members are hopeful that such was not the case, as stated on the organization's web site:

In the past twenty-four hours, the Russian space agency (RKA) has made a tentative conclusion that the Volna rocket carrying Cosmos 1 failed during the firing of the first stage. This would mean that Cosmos 1 is lost.

While it is likely that this conclusion is correct, there are some inconsistent indications from information received from other sources. The Cosmos 1 team observed what appear to be signals, that looks like they are from the spacecraft when it was over the first three ground stations and some Doppler data over one of these stations. This might indicate that Cosmos 1 made it into orbit, but probably a lower one than intended. The project team now considers this to be a very small probability. But because there is a slim chance that it might be so, efforts to contact and track the spacecraft continue. We are working with US Strategic Command to provide additional information in a day or so.

If the spacecraft made it to orbit, its autonomous program might be working, and after 4 days the sails could automatically deploy. While the chances of this are very, very small, we still encourage optical observers to see if the sail can be seen after that time.

We await further developments and information coming out of Russia, STRATCOM, and the tracking stations.

FMI: www.planetary.org