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BUMP!


Clear skies from Italy

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73 & clear skies from Bruno IK2WQA
Founder SETI ITALIA Team G. Cocconi

Here is the dedication Carl Sagan wrote in his best-selling book Cosmos:
For Ann Druyan

In the vastness of space and the immensity of time,
it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.

Greetings from Germany NRW
Ulli S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club m7 ©

S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club m7 ©

From my friends:
a smile to my friend Sir Ulli ;-)

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S@h Carl Sagan's Teams page
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73 & clear skies from Bruno IK2WQA
Founder SETI ITALIA Team G. Cocconi

:)

Hello to my good friends _ Ulli and Bruno ,


hello Ulli -- _Earth_Flag

<B>S@h _ Berkeley's Staff Friends Club member m2 ©[/b]

<A><B>------------- please excuse me , I am very sorry to be off the topic --</B>[/url] byron

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Cosmos 1 Solar Sail Spacecraft Heads to Loading Site

23 May 2005

A private team of space-savvy civilians has hit a major milestone in plans to launch the first spacecraft propelled by sunlight after shipping the small probe to be loaded atop ballistic missile.

The solar sail-propelled Cosmos 1 vehicle, hailed as the world’s first solar sail spacecraft, has left its Moscow testing center and now bound to Severomorsk, Russia, where it will be loaded into a modified intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and readied for a June 21 launch, mission planners announced Monday.
..............

a good answer came from networkman from Team AnandTech

Zefram Cochrane would be pleased :)

the right answer

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=39&threadid=1598167&enterthread=y

who knot kwow about Zefram Cochrane

but i think all Seti Users and Star Trek Fans know this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zefram_Cochrane

:)

Greetings from Germany NRW
Ulli S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club m7 ©

Date set for solar spacecraft launch

Cosmos 1, which has been funded by The Planetary Society, is scheduled to launch aboard a Russian rocket from a submarine in the Barents Sea on June 21, testing a technology that many experts believe could one day power missions into deep space.

When the spacecraft reaches an orbiting altitude of 800 kilometers (500 miles), it will deploy eight triangular 15-meter (50-foot) sails that will be slowly propelled by the pressure of sunlight particles bouncing off them.
...

Greetings from Germany NRW
Ulli S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club m7 ©

The Planetary Society's Cosmos 1 Weblog:
Bringing you Solar Sail Mission Events As They Happen!

Jun 14, 2005 | 09:15 PDT | 16:15 UTC
Launch minus 7 days 3 hours 30 min

Rehearsing the Launch

About a dozen people assembled here at POP pretty early in the morning for a simulation of the first hours of the Cosmos 1 mission, due to take place a week from now. These simulations are terribly important because they point out all kinds of logistical issues that need to be solved before launch day. Things like how the phone systems work (or don't work), how we are going to get word of the precise launch time to the guy who will be manning our temporary ground station out in the Marshall Islands, and stuff like that. One thing we learned pretty quickly was that we must not forget to synchronize our watches, or at least we must all have an accurate and precise UTC (Universal Time Coordinate) clock to refer to.
...

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Bringing you Solar Sail Mission Events As They Happen!

Jun 18, 2005 | 18:44 PDT | Jun 19 01:44 UTC
Launch minus 2 days 18 hours 1 min

This weekend, all the team members are taking their places for the launch. We've heard from Lou, apparently none the worse for wear for his trip on Aeroflot. But my favorite message of today came in from Viktor Kerzhanovich. Viktor has just arrived at Majuro, in the Marshall Islands, where he is setting up one of two temporary ground stations. We needed these temporary ground stations because the way the launch geometry turned out, Cosmos 1 is not going to fly directly over any of the permanent ground stations until the fifth orbit. That's a little too late to try to contact the spacecraft for the first time. So there are two temporary stations, one on the Kamchatka peninsula, and one in the Marshall Islands. Cosmos 1 should pass over Kamchatka during its orbit insertion burn, and over Majuro not long after the burn has ended.
...

[url=http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=3067]S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club m7 ©

PASADENA, Calif. - Scientists in Russia and California worked on final preparations for the planned launch of the first spacecraft propelled by sunlight.

If all goes as planned, Cosmos 1 was to be launched early Tuesday afternoon, California time, and carried into Earth's orbit by a converted intercontinental ballistic missile, according to the Planetary Society, which is undertaking the nearly $4 million experiment.

The missile was being launched from a submerged Russian submarine in the Barents Sea. Russian, American and Czech ground stations will track the craft.

Solar sails are seen as a means for achieving interstellar flight by using the gentle push from the continuous stream of light particles known as photons. Though gradual, the constant light pressure should allow a spacecraft to build up great speed over time, and cover great distances.

Solar sails do not rely on the solar wind — the stream of ionized particles flowing from the sun — which moves more slowly than light and with much less force.

On the Planetary Society's Web site, Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society and project director of Cosmos 1, said society scientists met Monday with their Russian counterparts and others at a ground tracking station about 75 miles southeast of Moscow.

They heard a report on spacecraft testing, he wrote, and "the spacecraft is ready for flight."

The Pasadena-based society was founded in 1980 by the late astronomer Carl Sagan, former Jet Propulsion Laboratory director Bruce Murray and Friedman, also a JPL veteran.

When Cosmos 1 is in orbit, inflatable tubes will stretch the sail material out and hold it rigid in eight structures resembling the blades of a windmill. Each blade, roughly 50 feet long, can be turned to reflect sunlight in different directions so that the craft can "tack" much like a sailboat in the wind.

Cosmos 1 is designed to go into a nearly polar orbit more than 500 miles high and operate for a month. Covering 720 square yards, it should be visible as a bright pinpoint of light in the night sky.

Japan tested solar sail deployment on a suborbital flight and Russia deployed a solar sail outside its old Mir space station, but neither involved controlled flight, Friedman said.

Cosmos 1 was built by the Russian aerospace company NPO Lavochkin. Most of the funds has come from Ithaca, N.Y.-based Cosmos Studios, which was co-founded by Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, to create science-based entertainment.

Sagan, an astronomer who extolled the grandeur and mystery of the universe in best-selling books and an acclaimed Public Broadcasting Service series, died in 1996.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Jun 21, 2005 | 13:32 PDT | 20:32 UTC
Launch plus 0 hours 46 min

Majuro did not receive signal.

Again, this was not wholly unexpected. We have to wait now for the next ground station contact, which is Panska Ves at 21:21:00 UT, about an hour from now.

Jun 21, 2005 | 13:21 PDT | 20:21 UTC
Launch plus 0 hours 35 min

Still nothing at Majuro

Jun 21, 2005 | 13:18 PDT | 20:18 UTC
Launch plus 0 hours 32 min

Little bit of signal at Petropavlovsk

Slava Linkin says Doppler signal was received at beginning, then was lost. That might be connected with the fact that the motor burn was happening at this point.

Jun 21, 2005 | 13:15 PDT | 20:15 UTC
Launch plus 0 hours 31 min

Majuro does not see signal yet

Jun 21, 2005 | 13:11 PDT | 20:11 UTC
Launch plus 0 hours 25 min

Report from Kamchatka is that they did not detect the spacecraft

This isn't necessarily unexpected. Petropavlovsk was a marginal contact, and it would have been happening while the spacecraft was spinning rapidly and thrusting, not an easy signal to deal with.

We are holding our breaths for the Majuro contact.

all fingers crossed, that all is going to an Good End

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PASADENA, Calif. - The world's first solar sail spacecraft was launched Tuesday from a Russian submarine under the Barents Sea but concern grew about whether it safely reached orbit as hours passed without a signal.

Cosmos 1, a $4 million experiment intended to show that a so-called solar sail can make a controlled flight, was launched at 12:46 p.m. PDT, and initial data reception was followed by silence.

"The news is not good," said Bruce Murray, a co-founder of The Planetary Society, which organized the launch.

Data stopped during a pass over a portable ground station on Russia's Kamchatka peninsula at about the time the rocket's final stage would have ignited, mission officials said.

There was no signal on later passes over stations in the Pacific Ocean, the Czech Republic and two in Russia. None of those passes, however, were optimal for receiving signals.

The U.S. military also did not make radar sightings on the path the spacecraft was predicted to follow if it did enter orbit, mission official Jim Cantrell said. The best pass straight over a ground station was scheduled to occur after 9 p.m. PDT.

Louis D. Friedman, the society's executive director and Cosmos 1 project director, said there had been some ambiguous data from the launch vehicle, making it uncertain whether the initial launch had actually worked properly.

If all went as planned, the spacecraft was to unfurl eight triangular sails, each nearly 50 feet long and just a quarter of the thickness of a trash bag. Controlled flight, achieved by rotating each sail to change its pitch, would be attempted early next week.

Do we start mourning now or do we still have hope? Any thoughts?

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PASADENA, Calif. - Scientists said they may have detected signals from the world's first solar sail spacecraft, hours after it suddenly stopped communicating following Tuesday's launch from a Russian submarine under the Barents Sea.

"Good news," said Bruce Murray, a co-founder of The Planetary Society, which organized the launch. "We are very likely in orbit ... we seem to have a live spacecraft."

The announcement came after an all-day search for Cosmos 1, a $4 million experiment intended to show that a so-called solar sail can make a controlled flight. The spacecraft was launched at 12:46 p.m. PDT, and initial data reception was followed by silence.

The signals were detected Tuesday night in a review of data recorded at ground tracking stations on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, Majuro in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific Ocean and at Panska Ves, Czech Republic.

If all went as planned, the spacecraft was to unfurl eight triangular sails, each nearly 50 feet long and just a quarter of the thickness of a trash bag.

Controlled flight, achieved by rotating each sail to change its pitch, would be attempted early next week. Cosmos 1 was supposed to orbit Earth once every 101 minutes and operate for at least a month.

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.


hit me

Greetings from Germany NRW
Ulli S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club m7 ©