Mission controllers may have received signal from solar sail
JOHN ANTCZAK
Associated Press
PASADENA, Calif. - Signals may have been detected from the Cosmos 1 solar sail spacecraft that lost communication during launch on a converted missile fired from a Russian submarine under the Barrents Sea, mission officials said late Tuesday night.
The news came after an all-day search for Cosmos 1, which is intended to demonstrate that a spacecraft can be propelled by the pressure of light from the sun. If it is confirmed that the signals detected by three ground stations did come from Cosmos 1, it means that the craft did achieve orbit, said mission official Jim Cantrell.
However, the craft would probably have gone into an unexpected orbit and its location in space and condition were yet to be determined, he said.
The signals were found in a review of data recorded at ground tracking stations on Russia's Kamchatka peninsula, Majuro in the Mashall Islands of the Pacific Ocean and at Panska Ves, Czech Republic.
"Good news," said Bruce Murray, a co-founder of The Planetary Society, which organized the mission. "We are very likely in orbit ... we seem to have a live spacecraft."
Cosmos 1 was launched at 12:46 p.m. PDT. There was initial data followed by silence before mission officials announced shortly before 10 p.m. that they may have picked up signals from the $4 million mission.
Data had originally stopped during a pass over a portable ground station on the Kamchatka peninsula at about the time a final rocket motor would have fired to put the craft into the proper orbit, mission officials said. There was no signal on passes over stations in the Pacific Ocean, the Czech Republic and two in Russia. None of those passes, however, were optimal for receiving signals.
The U.S. military also did not make radar sightings on the path the spacecraft was predicted to follow if it did enter orbit.
Signals were picked up during what officials had believed would be the craft's best pass, shortly before 9:30 p.m.
Funding for the project came largely from Cosmos Studios of Ithaca, N.Y., a science-based entertainment company that was founded by Ann Druyan, the widow of astronomer Carl Sagan, who also was a society co-founder. She sought to stay positive as the hours of silence wore on, and even joked, "I think I know why the mission was so affordable."
Early in the day she invoked the memory of her late husband and said she was looking forward to the sail deployment "when we really hope to light up the world with ... the reflective panels of Cosmos 1."
Then, during countdown, she sat nervously in a crowded room at the society headquarters, smiling at times and also seeming near tears, then stood and hugged her children, Sasha and Sam Sagan, and father, Harry, when word came over the phone from Moscow that the rocket was in flight.
After the succession of ground stations failed to find a signal from Cosmos 1, she said she felt a bit numb.
"When we had liftoff - and you all felt it in the room - the exhilaration was just so electrifying and ... I feel like I had an overdose of adrenaline," she said. "And now I feel curiously peaceful, relaxed. I'm curious, I really want to know what happened to it, and I really want to be involved in whatever the next mission is because I really believe in what we're doing here."
Immediately after launch, the spacecraft was supposed to deploy solar panels to charge its batteries and orbit for several days with its sails folded to allow any air in them to leak into the vacuum of space. On Saturday it was to be commanded to inflate tubes to unfurl its eight triangular Mylar sails, each nearly 50 feet long and just a quarter the thickness of a trash bag.
Controlled flight, achieved by rotating each blade to change its pitch, was scheduled to be attempted early next week.
Cosmos 1 was supposed to orbit Earth once every 101 minutes and operate for at least a month. The 100-foot-diameter disk formed by the blades would be visible from the ground as a point of light, officials said.
The non-governmental project was organized by The Planetary Society, a Pasadena-based organization founded by Sagan, Murray, who is a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory director and Friedman, also a JPL veteran.
Solar sails are seen as a means for achieving interstellar flight by using the gentle push from the continuous stream of light particles known as photons. Though gradual, the constant light pressure should allow a spacecraft to build up great speed over time, and cover great distances.
Such a craft would not have to carry chemical fuel to propel itself through space, and, according to advocates, would eventually achieve greater speed than a traditional spacecraft.
Although their control process is likened to the way sailboats tack in the wind, solar sails are not intended to rely on what is known as the solar wind - the stream of ionized particles spewing from the sun - which moves slower than light and with much less force.
Built in Russia by the Lavochkin Association and the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Science, Cosmos 1 was under the control of a mission operations center in Moscow linked to The Planetary Society's project center in a converted old barn in Pasadena.
Japan tested solar sail deployment on a suborbital flight and Russia deployed a solar sail outside its old Mir space station, but neither involved controlled flight.
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