The Cosmos 1 project has issued the appended statement, which encourages optical observers to see if the sail can be seen, in the event that it somehow made it to orbit, and deploys as scheduled in 4 days, 2005 Jun 26 during the period 04:41:59 to 04:46:58 UTC. Given the sail's expected brightness, it would not be terribly difficult for us to carry out a planar search. Let us continue to monitor developments over the next day or two, to help decide what to do. Ted Molczan http://planetary.org/solarsail/latest_update.html 10:30 am PDT, June 22 (17:30 UTC) The Planetary Society as issued the following statement on the fate of Cosmos 1, the first Solar Sail Spacecraft: In the past twenty-four hours, the Russian space agency (RKA) has made a tentative conclusion that the Volna rocket carrying Cosmos 1 failed during the firing of the first stage. This would mean that Cosmos 1 is lost. While it is likely that this conclusion is correct, there are some inconsistent indications from information received from other sources. The Cosmos 1 team observed what appear to be signals, that looks like they are from the spacecraft when it was over the first three ground stations and some Doppler data over one of these stations. This might indicate that Cosmos 1 made it into orbit, but probably a lower one than intended. The project team now considers this to be a very small probability. But because there is a slim chance that it might be so, efforts to contact and track the spacecraft continue. We are working with US Strategic Command to provide additional information in a day or so. If the spacecraft made it to orbit, its autonomous program might be working, and after 4 days the sails could automatically deploy. While the chances of this are very, very small, we still encourage optical observers to see if the sail can be seen after that time. We await further developments and information coming out of Russia, STRATCOM, and the tracking stations. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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