MOSCOW -- Scientists on Monday continued to analyze telemetry data received from a Russian-made solar sail to determine what had gone wrong during its disappointing test flight last week.

Search teams continued scouring the military training ground on the far-eastern Kamchatka peninsula where the Cosmos-1 test craft is believed to have landed, a spokeswoman for the Makeyev State Rocket Center, which designed the Volna launch vehicle, said Monday in a telephone interview.

The Cosmos-1, which was launched on top of a converted ICBM from a submerged nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea early Friday, failed to separate from the capsule on which it was mounted.

"As a result, neither the solar sail deployment test nor the re-entry capsule inflation sequence that were planned for this sub-orbital test flight were carried out," said a statement issued Saturday by

The Planetary Society, the Pasadena, California-based group that arranged funding for the project.

"Until all the data has been analyzed, it is impossible to make assumptions" about why the separation command was not executed, Makeyeva spokeswoman Yelena Kontareva said by telephone from the Chelyabinsk region, where the center is located. She added that preliminary results of the analysis could be available as early as Wednesday.

But Konstantin Pichkhadze, general director of the Babakin Space Center, which designed the craft, said that - if the problems were complicated - results of the telemetry analysis might not be available for as long as two weeks.

"If the problem is a simple one, it becomes apparent right away," he said in a telephone interview from Khimki, Moscow region. "If it is a complicated one, that requires more time."

Both Kontareva and Pichkhadze declined to speculate about possible causes behind Friday's problems.

However, in Saturday's statement, The Planetary Society said that "a very preliminary examination of the rocket telemetry data ... indicates that the separation command was terminated by an on-board fail-safe program because dynamic variations were sensed in the third stage. The launch vehicle was pre-programmed to override the separation command in the presence of dynamic variation."

During Friday's suborbital flight, the Cosmos-1 test craft was to separate from its capsule and unfurl its two 15-meter-long, wing-like blades before making a soft landing on Kamchatka. The test flight was intended as a preparatory experiment for the project's next step: to launch the 8-bladed Cosmos-2 into an 850-kilometer circular orbit. The actual solar sail flight had been scheduled tentatively for the end of this year, but it was unclear whether Friday's setback would cause a delay.

Each of the crafts' blades is made of aluminized mylar and measures about 75 square meters. Scientists believe the solar sails could promote space exploration by using pressure generated by the sun's light to propel spacecraft on interplanetary missions as distant as Jupiter, without using the large supplies of fuel normally required for such flights.