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Solar sail fails to enter orbit
Topic Started: Jun 21 2005, 10:18 AM (157 Views)
Admiralbill_gomec
UberAdmiral
Alliteration aside, Cosmos I will launch tomorrow if all goes according to plan.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050621/ap_on_...HNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Quote:
 
Scientists in Russia and California worked on final preparations for the planned launch of the first spacecraft propelled by sunlight.

If all goes as planned, Cosmos 1 was to be launched early Tuesday afternoon, California time, and carried into Earth's orbit by a converted intercontinental ballistic missile, according to the Planetary Society, which is undertaking the nearly $4 million experiment.

The missile was being launched from a submerged Russian submarine in the Barents Sea. Russian, American and Czech ground stations will track the craft.

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.

Solar sails do not rely on the solar wind — the stream of ionized particles flowing from the sun — which moves more slowly than light and with much less force.

On the Planetary Society's Web site, Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society and project director of Cosmos 1, said society scientists met Monday with their Russian counterparts and others at a ground tracking station about 75 miles southeast of Moscow.

They heard a report on spacecraft testing, he wrote, and "the spacecraft is ready for flight."

The Pasadena-based society was founded in 1980 by the late astronomer Carl Sagan, former Jet Propulsion Laboratory director Bruce Murray and Friedman, also a JPL veteran.

When Cosmos 1 is in orbit, inflatable tubes will stretch the sail material out and hold it rigid in eight structures resembling the blades of a windmill. Each blade, roughly 50 feet long, can be turned to reflect sunlight in different directions so that the craft can "tack" much like a sailboat in the wind.

Cosmos 1 is designed to go into a nearly polar orbit more than 500 miles high and operate for a month. Covering 720 square yards, it should be visible as a bright pinpoint of light in the night sky.

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, Friedman said.

Cosmos 1 was built by the Russian aerospace company NPO Lavochkin. Most of the funds has come from Ithaca, N.Y.-based Cosmos Studios, which was co-founded by Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, to create science-based entertainment.

Sagan, an astronomer who extolled the grandeur and mystery of the universe in best-selling books and an acclaimed Public Broadcasting Service series, died in 1996.

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Ngagh
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Huh?
Solar sail fails to enter orbit
By Our Foreign Staff

AN ATTEMPT to launch a spacecraft propelled by sunlight was reported to have failed last night when the booster rocket broke down shortly after lift-off in the Barents Sea.

The launch of Cosmos 1 was part of a joint Russian-American attempt at the first controlled flight using a solar sail. An official in Russia’s Northern Fleet told the RIA-Novosti news agency that the engine had failed 83 seconds after the launch from a submerged Russian submarine.

The official said that a search was under way for the solar sail and the Volna booster rocket.

The privately funded spacecraft blasted off in a converted Russian intercontinental ballistic missile at a cost of $4 million (£2.2 million).

Its sponsors, the Planetary Society, based in the US, had hoped that the craft, which was intended to deploy a petal-shaped solar sail to power its planned orbit around the Earth, would demonstrate that sunlight could propel interplanetary space travel.

The “solar sail” consists of eight 49.5ft (15.1m) structures resembling the blades of a windmill. Each blade can be turned to reflect sunlight in different directions so that the craft can tack like a yacht in the wind.

The sails are designed to capture light particles emitted by the sun. In theory, streams of such particles could push the reflecting sail through space the way wind propels sailboats.

Solar sails are seen as a potential means for achieving interstellar flight, allowing spacecraft to build up velocity and cover large distances. All previous attempts to unfold similar devices in space have failed.

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somerled
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Admiral MacDonald RN
Actually , it's in the wrong orbit from what I have heard , so all is not lost.
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Admiralbill_gomec
UberAdmiral
I have merged these two topics, seeing as they are about the same thing.

The latest news:

Titled: Mission controllers may have heard from Cosmos 1, now must find it

Quote:
 
Scientists who believe they may have detected signals from the world's first solar sail spacecraft say it could be hours or days before they figure out exactly where the $4 million Cosmos 1 is traveling.

The signals were picked up shortly before 10 p.m. PDT Tuesday, hours after the spacecraft stopped communicating with mission controllers. Those communications had ceased soon after its launch from a Russian submarine under the Barrents Sea.

Word they may have resumed 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.

"It's good news because we are in orbit - very likely in orbit," said Bruce Murray, a co-founder of The Planetary Society, the Pasadena-based organization that organized the mission. "It is not the nominal orbit. My interpretation is there was some kind of anomaly associated with the firing (of a booster rocket), but it didn't crash us into the ground. We seem to have a live spacecraft. I'm optimistic."

If the signals are from the spacecraft, they indicate it probably went into a different orbit than expected, which means mission controllers will have to scan the heavens until they find it.

"This kind of search procedure can take hours to days," said mission official Jim Cantrell.

He speculated that the spacecraft was in a lower orbit than planned because the most typical problem scenario involves one of its booster rockets underperforming.

The signals, which were weak, may have been missed earlier because ground trackers weren't looking in the right place for them. They were picked up separately by two tracking stations in different parts of the world, at Majuro in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific Ocean and at Panska Ves in the Czech Republic.

Cosmos 1 was launched at 12:46 p.m. PDT. There was initial data followed by the hours of silence.

The data stopped coming 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 its proper orbit, mission officials said.

The U.S. military also did not record radar sightings on the path the spacecraft was expected to follow.

If all went as planned, Cosmos 1 was to unfurl eight triangular sails, each nearly 50 feet long and just a quarter of the thickness of a trash bag.

It was to orbit Earth once every 101 minutes and operate for at least a month.

Controlled flight, achieved by rotating each sail to change its pitch, was to be attempted early next week.

Asked Tuesday night how soon the mission might be able to get back on track, Cantrell said: "Have to find it first."

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.

The non-governmental project's organizer, The Planetary Society, was founded by astronomer Carl Sagan; Murray, who is a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory director; and Louis D. Friedman, another JPL veteran.

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.

Funding for the project came largely from Cosmos Studios of Ithaca, N.Y., a science-based entertainment company that was founded by Ann Druyan, Sagan's widow, who also was a society co-founder. She was delighted by Tuesday night's turn of events.

"There's always that period where your heart sinks and you feel like you have to accept the worst possible reality," she said. "There has been another curve in the roller coaster. It's really great news."


http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/monterey...ws/11951255.htm

Comment: I guess that old SS-N-18 didn't work as well as they thought?
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