RSSStatus of Solar Spacecraft Unknown
By Ed Oswald | Published June 22, 2005, 1:07 PM
The status of Cosmos 1, the first solar-powered spacecraft, was unknown Wednesday afternoon following conflicting reports saying that either the ship was destroyed on liftoff, or is in a much closer orbit to Earth than planned.
Signals believed to have come from the craft have been detected in the Marshall Islands and in Russia, although confirmation was not available. U.S. Strategic Command in Nebraska is working with mission officials in an attempt to locate Cosmos 1.
The craft, which is powered by light from the sun, is designed to test the feasibility of solar sail technology for space flight.
Scientists predict that photons would push on the ultra-thin sheets of Mylar, propelling it through space. The hope is that this technology will speed up space travel, while also making it considerably cheaper.
The craft was launched on a Russian rocket late Tuesday afternoon; however, no signals were received when it was expected to enter orbit. According to the Russian space agency Roskosmos, 83 seconds into the flight one of the engines on the rocket failed.
"That the weak signals were recorded at the expected times of spacecraft passes over the ground stations is encouraging, but in no way are they conclusive enough for us to be sure that they came from Cosmos 1 working in orbit," project director Louis Friedman said in a statement on the Planetary Society Web site early Wednesday.
Both the Planetary Society, the group responsible for the mission, and Roskosmos would not rule out the solar craft had just entered a different orbit than expected.
Cosmos 1 carries a $4 million price tag, and is about 10 stories high. Although the mission is not federally funded, officials said they plan to share results with NASA if and when the mission completes.
"Bah! Just a tiny setback! Lets drink to that!"
cheers! (raises vodka bottles)
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|I think the russians said that it is lost.
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|If the conversation went in such way, here's my contribution:)
Russian space programms have very little financing and experience big difficulties because of that. Their whole potential cannot unfold, and space technics which is being used now was developed in the USSR and is mostly old-fashioned. So they try to make money on those old technologies to create new ones, and of course, old technics isn't too reliable. Although still one of the most reliable and cheap in the world.
By the way, that craft was also built in Russia for american money:)
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|as a child I fully believed that as of the year 2000 you could like take the "bus" trip to the moon...I know now that we'll still have to wait a liitle more for that fact...as little as the year 3000...
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|Ouch. However, it sounds like an oxymoron, with "Russian" and "space agency" being used together.
Sigh...
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|haha. guess u don't know who was the first nation to visit the Space. surprise -- it was Russia. btw, now americans flying to ISS on russian ships. coz american shuttles just crash&burn.
so.. what really sounds oxymoron? only your utter ignorance.
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|Actually, the Soviet Union was the first nation to successfully launch a man-made satellite into space, not Russia. The Soviet Union no longer exists.
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|From Associated Press:
Past attempts to unfold similar devices in space have failed.
In 1999, Russia launched a similar experiment with a sun-reflecting device from its Mir space station, but the deployment mechanism jammed and the device burned up in the atmosphere.
In 2001, Russia tried again, but the device failed to separate from the booster and burned in the atmosphere.
The botched launch of the solar vehicle was the second failure of a Russian booster rocket in just one day. Earlier Tuesday, the Molniya-M rocket carrying a military communications satellite failed shortly after its liftoff from a northern launch pad and fell over Siberia.
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|Was it Russia as we know it today or was it the USSR which Im pretty sure imploded?
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|True, but all the parts they are using were produced during the cold-war. They are retro-fitting their ICBMs to launch objects into orbit...a tack that so far has not had a good deal of success.
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|nad again...all the 'rockets' we are talking about are missles produced during the cold war which are obsolete and now being retrofitted to attempt to find a use for them.
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|Actually it was a Russian B*1tch Licca or something like that, which was the first living being in space. The Russians sent a dog to test their first space trip.
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|How can they not know if it is destroyed or not..?? ;)
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|At least, last time I checked. They were getting ghost signals from the stations it should have been over. They were not strong enough to verify as actually coming from the Sail, so they cannot say for sure weather it's completely gone or just floating a little south of it's intended altitude.
I assume they lost contact with it at some point and up until they recieved the signals they assumed it was a total loss.
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|Man, should've gone with the $8Mil sail. I think the rockets on those actually come with fuel....
Sorry, guys, but I gotta try and find some humor here when we're talking about this amount of money spent on what now amounts to the equivilent of the honda civic that's been sitting on the side of the highway here for 3 days with a burnt-out hole where the engine should be.
At least it's still under Manufacturer's Warranty, right? 8 year/8 light-year on those babys.
*puts on tin-foil hat*
If this thing is still in our atmosphere...rasies it's sails and accellerates via the masive amounts of light it'll be recieveing in orbit for a few days/weeks. I mean, couldn't it theoretically go fast enough to tear a hole in space-time and crash land in Rosewell, NM a few decades ago?
*removes tin-foil hat*
Nahhhh....
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|So that's where the little spacemen come from... it wasn't from the past but from the future that tore a hole in the space/time continuem... scary ain't it! But what you just said is plausable, accept of course there were no little spacemen, sort of like Back to the Future.
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|"Oops."
So...do they get their money back for that rocket at least?
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|I think Roskosmos has a no refund policy :)
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|maybe they already have insurance :p
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