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  Home arrow News arrow News from Space arrow lost at sea; going deep

 
lost at sea; going deep | Print |  E-mail
Written by staff   
Tuesday, 21 June 2005

lost in space... uh, sea

After launch on June 21 from a Russian submarine in the Barents sea, The Planetary Society's Cosmos-1 solar craft failed to reach orbit due to a launch vehicle malfunction.

Designed to be the first craft propelled by the sun's light, Cosmos-1 was equipped with eight 50-foot-long sails engineered to unfold after the craft achieved orbit. Unfortunately, according to Russian flight control, the failure of the Russian Volna launch vehicle kept the craft from ever reaching space, and instead propelled it right back into the Barents sea, possibly because the Volna's stages never separated.

According to the Planetary Society, however, a handful of tracking signals were received, so that may indicate that the craft was ejected from the launch vehicle in time to achieve a low, unstable orbit that quickly decayed and caused it to plummet to Earth.

One way or another, we'd bet our lucky tooth that we haven't seen the last of the Planetary Society.

 

going deep

On July 4, NASA will blast a stadium-sized hole in the side of comet Tempel-1, just because they can. The Deep Impact craft is scheduled for a 1:52 a.m. rendezvous with the comet.

On July 3, Deep Impact will separate into an impactor unit and an observation platform; the one-meter-long impactor will ram the comet.

"The last 24 hours of the impactor's life should provide the most spectacular data in thehistory of cometary science," said Deep Impact Principal Investigator Dr. Michael in a recent NASA statement.

 
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