* Astronomy

The launch of the Volna on 21 June at 11:46 pm local time from the Barents Sea is shown here.
The video ends about 20 seconds after launch from the submarine Borisoglebsk, and 63 seconds before the first stage burn ended prematurely, causing Cosmos 1 to be lost.
The rocket manufacturer says that after the first-stage shutdown, a fail-safe mechanism would have prevented the later stages from separating and firing. They claim the entire rocket and its spacecraft payload fell into the Barents Sea, somewhere east of the launch area but west of the Novaye Zemlya archipelago.



However, a signal received at the Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka ground station seems to indicate that the fourth-stage orbit-insertion motor fired, and later signals recorded at Majuro, Marshall Islands and Panska Ves, Czech Republic ground stations also seem to be from the Cosmos 1 spacecraft.
If these signals are confirmed, they would indicate that Cosmos 1 reached orbit. Mission analysts at the Space Research Institute in Moscow and at The Planetary Society are currently analyzing and testing the measured signals to determine if they are really from the spacecraft.

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Officials in charge of the Russian rocket that failed during launch of the Cosmos 1 solar sail spacecraft believe that the booster's stages never separated, the project director said in a statement.

The officials believe the rocket went down near Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago that separates the Barents Sea from the Kara Sea, Louis D. Friedman said in a statement from Moscow posted on the Web site of The Planetary Society

He attributed the information to the Makeev Rocket Design Bureau, which was in charge of the three-stage Volna rocket, a three-stage, converted missile launched by a Russian submarine under the Barents Sea on Tuesday.
Russian authorities have said the booster failed during the first-stage firing, 83 seconds into flight, but there were no details on what the failure entailed.

Cosmos 1 carried eight Mylar sails that were to be unfolded in orbit to try to demonstrate that a spacecraft could be propelled by the pressure of sunlight.
Although Russian officials said the first-stage failure prevented Cosmos 1 from reaching orbit, tracking stations at several points around the globe recorded weak signals that Planetary Society team members said seemed to have come from Cosmos 1, suggesting it somehow reached space but was in the wrong orbit.
Mission officials gave that a very low probability, but were continuing to analyze the tracking station data.

"We are hopeful of having more definitive results from their analysis in the next few days," Friedman wrote in the statement.

Friedman is executive director of The Planetary Society, which he co-founded in 1980 with the late astronomer Carl Sagan and former Jet Propulsion Laboratory director Bruce Murray. The space-interest group says it has members in 125 countries.

(from blog)


Emily Lakdawalla

Jun 23 02:12 UTC

With the failure of Cosmos 1 virtually certain, the team members that have been staffing Project Operations Pasadena have elected to return to their homes.

Thanks to the Internet, if our spacecraft miraculously reappears, each of us will still be able to keep watch over the mission from our individual remote locations. Greg returns to Berkeley, Jim and Brent to Utah, and Paul to his usual life at the Jet Propulsion Lab, just up the valley from Pasadena. Lou will be returning from Moscow in a couple of days. I took off for home a couple of hours ago in order to begin to catch up on sleep.

The team may be scattering, but it's not over. The search for the spacecraft continues. The search continues in the present, as several observatories have offered to try to look for a signal from the spacecraft.
(If you, too, have a spare observatory, feel free to search at a frequency of 401.5275 Hz, but I am afraid that I can't offer any advice on where to point your antenna.)
The search also continues into the past, as Strategic Command is working through its "unknown objects bucket" (as Jim called it this morning) to find where the spacecraft and its launch vehicle ended up.

At the Society, we're already talking about what to do next. A few hours ago, Bill Nye -- the Science Guy, and also the Vice-President of The Planetary Society -- asked all of the staff to gather together in the living room of the 100-year-old house in which we work. He opened and poured champagne for all of us, and we raised several toasts. We toasted Cosmos 1, first of all; it was an audacious dream, that we arrogantly compared to the flight of the Wright Brothers.
We toasted Lou Friedman in absentia, for whom it must have been a pretty rough week. We toasted the staff and volunteers of the Society, for all the work it's taken to bring Cosmos 1 to the world.
We toasted Ann Druyan, the chief sponsor of Cosmos 1, for making it possible, and for being the mission's spiritual leader. We toasted our members, for their devotion to our cause and their support.
Finally, we toasted: Cosmos 2? Many of our members are telling us they're ready to try again. We can't say whether or not we'll try again with this mission until we find out what really happened.
But we'll certainly stay in the business, and try more audacious things, like the Solar Sail, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Mars airplanes, or Venus balloons we've advocated in the past.

source

The Russian navy's Northern Fleet announced Wednesday the loss of Cosmos 1.
Another satellite that was monitoring the launch, "didn't establish contact, which signifies its loss" - Igor Dygalo, spokesman for the Northern Fleet.

The loss of Cosmos 1 was due to the failure of part of the Volna carrier that was expected to take the spacecraft into orbit after its launch from a submarine in the Barents Sea.

"Due to the spontaneous failure of the motor of the first part of the Volna missile carrier at the 83rd second of the launch, the unique device 'solar sail' did not reach its orbit" - Roskosmos.

Russia's ITAR-TASS news agency cited a senior source involved in the project as saying the spacecraft had probably come down somewhere near New Zealand.

However, the Planetary Society, said it was too early to write off the launch, as signals had been picked up from Cosmos 1, albeit not in the correct orbit.

"We feel reasonably confident that what we saw was real signal... what this means is that we are probably in orbit, but it's not the orbit that we thought it was"

Signals from Cosmos 1 were meant to reach Earth once the craft reached orbit about an hour from its launch at 19:46 GMT on Monday.