( Source: Reuters)
22/6/2005 8:10:16 AM

PASADENA, Calif (Reuters) - A hunt began on Wednesday for a privately funded experimental spacecraft that appeared to have gone off course shortly after it was launched from a Russian submarine in the Barents Sea a day earlier.

Cosmos 1, the first solar sail-powered spacecraft, appeared to be "alive" and sending signals to tracking stations but could be in a lower orbit than planned, said mission backers at the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California.

"We have no evidence that anything is wrong with the spacecraft at all," said Bruce Betts, the Planetary Society's director of projects, late on Tuesday.

But there were conflicting reports. Russia's Itar-Tass and Interfax news agencies quoted an unnamed Russian space agency source as saying that the craft had crashed near a remote island in the Barents Sea close to where it had been launched.

Members of the Planetary Society, the world's largest private space advocacy group, hoped the mission would show that a group of space enthusiasts could kick-start a race to the stars on a shoestring budget of $4 million (2.2 million pounds).

The mission's planners conceived of the first solar-sail spacecraft, and were running the program out of Moscow and a 1920s bungalow in Pasadena.

Their brainchild, Cosmos 1 blasted off in a converted Russian ballistic missile from the Barents Sea on Tuesday. But the disc-shaped craft lost contact with its controller almost immediately. For several hours, Cosmos 1 was believed lost.

SAILING ON SUNLIGHT

But weak signals received by tracking stations in the Pacific Ocean, Russia and the Czech Republic seemed to show that Cosmos 1 had made it into orbit.

Mission controllers discovered after reviewing telemetry data recorded by the stations that the craft had signaled its passage during what had been believed to be several hours of radio silence, said Planetary Society co-founder Bruce Murray.

"The good news is we have reason to believe it's alive and in orbit," said Murray, a former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The bad news is we don't know where it is."

The signal appeared weak probably because the orbiter had veered off course during its final rocket burn, and ground antennae were now trained on the wrong part of the sky, Murray said.

For that reason, it was not clear whether planned communications sessions with the spacecraft would help mission managers find Cosmos 1, Murray said.

They planned to enlist the help of the U.S. Strategic Command, whose job is to monitor the skies for signs of incoming missiles and other threats.

Mission backers still face the prospect that Cosmos 1 is in a deteriorating orbit and may eventually fall back to Earth, or the chance that the orbit is so irregular that the solar sails cannot deploy properly.

Cosmos 1 was to unfurl a 30-metre petal-shaped solar sail to power its planned orbit around Earth and show that photons -- light particles emanating from the Sun -- would impel the craft forward at an ever-increasing rate of speed.

The mission's goal is to raise Cosmos 1 to a higher orbit above the Earth by "sailing" the spacecraft on streams of photons.

The project started as a dream by Planetary Society founders Carl Sagan, Murray and Louis Friedman, a former NASA engineer who proposed sending a solar-sail craft to rendezvous with Halley's Comet in the 1970s.

Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, provided most of the funding for the mission through her entertainment company, Cosmos Studios.