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Solar-sail craft Cosmos 1 lost
Hope faded on Wednesday for the world's first solar-sail spacecraft, Cosmos 1, after the Russian navy's Northern Fleet said it had failed to reach orbit. A satellite monitoring failed to detect a signal from Cosmos, "which signifies its loss," a spokesman for the Northern Fleet said.
Hope faded on Wednesday for the world's first solar-sail spacecraft, Cosmos 1, after the Russian navy's Northern Fleet said it had failed to reach orbit. A satellite monitoring failed to detect a signal from Cosmos, "which signifies its loss," a spokesman for the Northern Fleet said.
The loss of Cosmos 1 was due to the failure of part of the Volna rocket that was expected to take the spacecraft into orbit after its launch from a submarine in the Barents Sea, Russia's Roskosmos space agency said on its Internet site.
It said the first stage of the three-stage rocket failed 83 seconds after launch, Roskosmos said. The Volna is an inter-continental ballistic missile converted to deploy small spacecraft into low earth orbit. The ITAR-TASS news agency cited a senior source involved in the project as saying the spacecraft had probably come down near New Zealand.
A monitoring station in the Czech republic that had been due to track Cosmos 1's progress also said it had received no signals from the spacecraft. "We haven't picked up anything... we can't evaluate its chances at all," said Jiri Simunek at the Czech Academy of Science's Panska Ves observation centre.
The US organisation overseeing the project, the Planetary Society, had yet to concede failure, saying that monitoring stations in Russia's Far East and Majuro in the Marshall Islands had picked up signals from Cosmos 1.
"We feel reasonably confident that what we saw was a real signal... what this means is that we are probably in orbit, but it's not the orbit that we thought it was," the Planetary Society, based in Pasadena, California, said on its Internet site. Signals from Cosmos 1 were meant to reach Earth once the craft reached orbit about an hour after its launch at 19:46 GMT on Monday.
