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, the Pasadena-based organization
behind the $4 million (euro3.3 million) experiment.
The three-stage Volna
rocket, a converted missile, was 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.
The Cosmos 1 spacecraft
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.
advertisement
