MOSCOW -- A converted ballistic missile carrying an experimental solar sail was launched from a Russian atomic submarine early July 20 but it is unclear at this point whether the mission was successful.
An official with Russia's Lavochkin Scientific Production Center, which designed the suborbital Cosmos-1 craft, said the solar sails failed to deploy as planned.
However, a U.S.-based engineer who provided support to the mission, which was sponsored by the Planetary Society, said there is no way to determine conclusively whether or not the solar-sail blades deployed until the Cosmos-1 craft is recovered.
"Were not in a position to state one way or another whether there was a sail blade deployment anomoly," said John Garvey of Huntington Beach, Calif., who is providing systems engineering support to the Cosmos 1 mission.
Garvey said the spacecraft had no telemetry capabilities on board to monitor the blade deployment during the flight.
The Lavochkin official offered a dimmer assessment of what happened following the 4:30 a.m. launch from a submarine in the Barents Sea.
"It is impossible to assess this trial launch because the actual experiment wasn't allowed to happen," Igor Shevalyov, spokesman for the Lavochkin Scientific Production Center, said in a telephone interview.
The 40-kilogram Cosmos-1 was launched into its suborbital flight trajectory aboard a Volna rocket - a converted submarine-launched ballistic missile - from the Barents Sea north of Murmansk on schedule, and all three booster stages separated, according to a report posted on the World Wide Web site of the Pasadena, California-based Planetary Society.
According to Shevalyov, the capsule bearing the Cosmos-1 landed somewhere in the area of Russia's Kamchatka peninsula as planned, but the craft did not separate from the capsule and the two triangular blades of its solar sail did not unfold.
Now scientists will examine the craft and recordings made by a camera mounted on the uppermost part of the rocket in an attempt to determine what happened.
Initially, the launch of the Cosmos-1 had been scheduled for April, but was delayed due to technical difficulties.
Representatives of the Makeyev State Rocket Center, which modified the Volna, were unavailable for comment at press time, but the center's deputy director, Vyacheslav Danilkin, said in televised comments following the launch that the flight was going as planned.
Russian Navy officials called the launch "successful."
Navy spokesman Alexander Smirnov noted that launches of converted submarine-launched ballistic missiles benefit his agency, since they help the Navy determine whether its missiles are fit for service.
Both Smirnov and Shevalyov said they did not know the launch's price tag, although Shevalyov said the Planetary Society had channeled $2.5 million into the development of the Cosmos-1 and the Cosmos-2, which has eight blades instead of two and would be placed into orbit after testing at lower altitudes has been completed.
Shevalyov said he is confident that the project's financial backers would remain committed to it and said the Lavochkin Center would push ahead with tests.
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