The Cosmos 1 blasted out of a Russian submarine yesterday but failed to reach orbit after rocket boosters shut off 83 seconds into the launch. Most fear the mission is over for the time being.
The Planetary Society, the primary sponsor of the mission, reported on their website that weak signals were picked up but nothing has been confirmed.
“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,” said project director Louis Friedman from mission control in Moscow.
He went on to say that if the Volna rocket had misfired, then there’s a legitimate possibility the rocket didn’t make it. The Russian Space Agency said last night they thought the rocket misfired.
“This,” Friedman noted, “would almost certainly have prevented the spacecraft from reaching the correct orbit.”
The experiment showed great promise as a number of space agencies, including NASA, had solar sail projects in development. Nobody except Russia had even attempted to put a solar sail ship into space. Back in 1999, Russia tried an experiment from the Mir space station but the device failed to open and burned up in the atmosphere and 2001 they tried again using the rocket plan but the ship and booster failed to separate.
The key to solar sailing lies with that big ball of gas that keeps us and the earth from freezing more solid than it already is. The sun produces small, elementary particles called photons and while there are multiple types of photons, they’re most commonly associated with visible light. The solar sails made of Mylar and backed with aluminum are designed to capture these photons in a kind of solar wind and this will propel the Cosmos 1 forward. In theory, there’s no upper limit to the speed of the ship.
As with any journey though, this pursuit will not end here. All the experiments tried so far have failed due to some mechanical failure. The actually solar sail technology remains untested. Hopefully, in a couple of years, there will be a new project so folks can try this again.
John Stith is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
