* Astronomy

The Planetary Society confirms that launch has occurred.
However…

Ground station coverage throughout the launch tracked the performance of the Volna rocket, according to Planetary Society officials. The first primary contact for Cosmos 1 occurred about ten minutes into the flight as it passes over a portable communications facility on Russia's Kamchatka peninsula near the Pacific Ocean. Another pass above the Marshall Islands after orbital insertion began about 24 minutes after lift-off.

However, permanent ground stations located in the Czech Republic and Russia did not hear from the spacecraft near the end of its first 100-minute orbit, but the initial high-quality pass does not occur until the fifth orbit some eight-and-a-half hours after lift-off when Cosmos 1 flies above the Tarusa and Bear Lakes facilities in Russia.

The lack of communications from the solar sail spacecraft is preventing any confirmation of a successful ascent to orbit.
There's no news from the latest opportunity for contact as it flew over Europe at 2121 GMT.

The next opportunity comes at 0423 GMT tonight.

Deployment of the eight ultra-thin solar sail blades will not occur before Sunday to allow time for ground controllers in Russia to fully test the performance of the craft. Once unfurled, the blades will stretch about 100 feet tip-to-tip.

On June 21, if all goes well, a Soviet Volna rocket originally designed to deliver nuclear warheads will push a 100kg American-designed spacecraft to an orbit 500 miles high. The payload will open and like the petals of a flower, eight huge triangular blades 15 metres long will unfurl to reflect the rays of the sun.

Cosmos 1 - a dream of the late visionary astronomer Carl Sagan, his wife Ann Druyan and his friend Louis Friedman, a former Nasa scientist - will be the first practical test of science fiction technology.
In the vacuum of space, even light has force. Particles of light that slam against the fragile sails - only a thousandth of a millimetre thick - will begin to accelerate the space clipper.
The acceleration will be tiny, but in the course of a day the spacecraft may have gained 45 metres a second.
After 100 days in the sun it could get up to 10,000mph. In three years, such a spacecraft could be the fastest manmade thing in space, without using a drop of rocket fuel.

The launch will be the first effective test of the technology. An attempt in 2001 went awry when the third stage of a Russian rocket failed to open. Since then, the mission's backers, the Planetary Society, a private organisation founded by Sagan and Dr Friedman, the television company Cosmos Studios, and the Russian partners, have looked again at every detail.
Nasa and another US government agency have undertaken to monitor the flight. Astronomers around the world have been invited to track the bright new star in the night sky on the longest day of the year.

"Reaching this milestone puts us on the doorstep to space. We are proud of our new spacecraft and hope that Cosmos 1 blazes a new path into the solar system, opening the way for eventual journeys to the stars." - Dr Louis Friedman.
Solar sails offer the best hope for very long distance missions: chemical rocket fuel is expensive, deadweight on a long journey and too inefficient.

June 21 is the opening of the mission's "launch window": weather or technical problems could delay the project. But hopes are high.
"As the rays of the sun strike the ancient astronomical observatories of Stonehenge and Chaco Canyon, Cosmos 1 will rise from the sea into space to take its place in the great story of exploration," - Ms Ann Druyan, head of Cosmos Studios and the mission's programme director.
(source the Guardian)

Cosmos 1, the world`s first solar sail spacecraft, has shipped in preparation for a launch window that opens on June 21, 2005, travelling from the test facility of Lavochkin Association in Moscow to Severomorsk, Russia.
The innovative and first-of-its-kind solar sail, a project of The Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios, will launch atop a converted ICBM from a submerged Russian submarine. It will deploy in Earth orbit and attempt the first controlled flight of a solar sail.



"Reaching this milestone puts us on the doorstep to space! We are proud of our new spacecraft and hope that Cosmos 1 blazes a new path into the solar system, opening the way to eventual journeys to the stars." - Louis Friedman, Planetary Society Executive Director and the Cosmos 1 Project Director.

The Planetary Society is working with the spacecraft developers, the Lavochkin Association and the Space Research Institute in Russia, to fly this solar sail mission. Cosmos 1 was funded by Cosmos Studios, the science-based entertainment company led by Ann Druyan, who also serves as the solar sail mission`s Program Director. Additional donations from members of The Planetary Society helped make the mission possible.

"Launching Cosmos 1 on the day of the summer solstice is a great way to honour our ancestors and to continue the journey to the stars that they began. As the rays of the sun strike the ancient astronomical observatories of Stonehenge and Chaco Canyon, Cosmos 1 will rise from the sea into space to take its place in the great story of exploration." - Ann Druyan

Cosmos 1 has attracted world-wide attention by being the first attempt at a revolutionary and potentially much faster way of moving through space, and because the project was created by an independent, non-profit organization and financed by a private company. The combination of solar sail technology coupled with a submarine-based launch opens the door for new and low-cost space systems in the future.

Once Cosmos 1 achieves Earth orbit, the mission team will spend the first few days monitoring the spacecraft and allowing any remaining air in the packed blades to leak out before deploying its eight solar sail blades. The pressure of photons ` sunlight ` bouncing off the highly reflective solar sail will provide the spacecraft`s only form of propulsion.

NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), Japan and Russia all have developed solar sails, but none has yet tried to prove that the sails can propel a spacecraft under controlled flight. Russia and Japan have conducted flight tests of deployment, while NASA and ESA have conducted ground test deployments, but thus far they have no test flights scheduled.

Two U.S. government agencies, NOAA and NASA, have signed cooperative agreements with The Planetary Society to receive valuable flight data from the solar sail mission. In return, the no-exchange-of-funds agreements permit the Society to utilize agency facilities and expertise in tracking and mission operations of Cosmos 1.


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An experiment to accelerate the spacecraft with a microwave beam from Earth will be conducted during a later stage of the mission. Led by James Benford of Microwaves Sciences, Inc. and Prof. Gregory Benford of the University of California-Irvine, their team will use a NASA Deep Space Network radar antenna to send the beam to the spacecraft. The Planetary Society must approve the activation of the experiment and will do so only after the prime mission objective of controlled solar sail flight is achieved.

An international tracking network will receive mission data at stations scattered around the globe, from Moscow to Majuro in the Marshall Islands. The spacecraft will be tracked from the ground through its radio and an on-board GPS system and micro-accelerometer.

Solar Sail Watch, a program designed for the general public, will invite people around the world to help track Cosmos 1 and photograph its progress across the night sky. Once its sails unfurl, Cosmos 1 will be bright enough to be easily visible to the naked eye. The Planetary Society urges everyone to witness this historic mission first hand.

The spacecraft will be launched on a Volna rocket to an approximately 800-km high, circular, near polar orbit.

"The solar sail is an important step in development of space technologies. Now we are running through the final stage of this project, which became a reality thanks to the efforts of The Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios. Lavochkin Association has been creating automatic spacecraft since 1965 and performed the first soft landings on the Moon and Venus in the 1960s and 70s. Building the solar sail spacecraft has involved interesting and complicated problems, which we worked on solving with the Institute of Space Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Lavochkin Association team developed a number of successful project and engineering solutions which helped us to create this small spacecraft to help conduct great space ventures." - Konstantin Pichkhadze, first deputy of Designer General and Director General of Lavochkin Association


Original Article:

-- Edited by Blobrana at 01:13, 2005-06-22