Scientists said on Tuesday night that they may have detected a signal from the world’s first solar sail spacecraft, hours after the experimental craft suddenly stopped communicating following its launch.
Cosmos 1, which was built on a shoestring $3,6-million budget, appeared to be lost when initial data reception was followed by silence almost immediately after its launch at 2046 BST on Tuesday from a converted Russian submarine under the Barents Sea.
But scientists believe Cosmos 1 may be in a lower orbit than planned though despite the fact that a signal has been received, it was unclear whether the mission could be salvaged.
”Good news … we are very likely in orbit … we seem to have a live spacecraft. The bad news is we don’t know where it is,” said Bruce Murray, a co-founder of the Planetary Society, which organised the launch.
Murray, a former director of Nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory, was speaking at a press conference in Pasadena, California, where the Planetary Society is based.
If all has gone to plan, the spacecraft will have unfurled eight triangular sails, each nearly 15m long and just a quarter of the thickness of a plastic rubbish bag.
The experiment is intended to show that a so-called solar sail can make a controlled flight without having to rely on chemical fuel for propulsion beyond its launch. The theory is that interstellar flight can be achieved by using the gentle push from the continuous stream of light particles known as photons. Though slight, the constant light pressure should allow a spacecraft to build up great speed over time and cover great distances.
In the latest update on the Planetary Society’s website, project director Louis Friedman — also formerly at Nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory — cautioned that some data point to a launch vehicle misfiring, something that would prevent the spacecraft from achieving orbit.
”That the weak signals were recorded at the expected times of spacecraft passes over the ground stations is encouraging, but in no way are they conclusive enough for us to be sure that they came from Cosmos 1 working in orbit,” he said.
The solar sail, which was built in Russia, is under the control of a mission operations centre in Moscow, and Friedman said the Russian space agency indicated that the Volna rocket may have had a problem during its first or second stage firing.
”This would almost certainly have prevented the spacecraft from reaching the correct orbit,” Friedman said.
After several hours of radio silence, signals were received on Tuesday night at ground tracking stations on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, the Marshall Islands of the Pacific Ocean and at Panska Ves in Czech Republic.
If the mission is recovered, controlled flight, achieved by rotating each sail to change its pitch, will be attempted early next week. Cosmos 1 was supposed to orbit Earth once every 101 minutes and operate for at least a month.
In the past, Japan has tested solar sail deployment on a suborbital flight and Russia deployed a similar device outside its old Mir space station, but neither involved controlled flight.
The Planetary Society was founded by the late astronomer Carl Sagan and brought to completion by Murray, and Friedman. Cosmos 1 was built by the Lavochkin Association and the space research institute at the Russian Academy of Science.
Funding came largely from Cosmos Studios of New York, a science-based entertainment company that was founded by Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan.
”Whatever we discover from this mission, if it’s not a success, we’ll still learn from it,” she said. ”The way to the stars is hard.” – Guardian Unlimited Â