SETI public: Cosmos 1 Solar Sail Update for June 15, 2005

• Previous message: LARRY KLAES: "SETI public: Pioneer Anomaly and the Kuiper Belt mass distribution"

http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/latest_update.html

Solar Sail Update, June 15, 2005

Cosmos1 "Mated" to Volna Rocket in Preparation for Tuesday Launch

by Project Director Louis Friedman

The world’s first solar sail spacecraft, Cosmos 1, is now mated to its Volna
launch vehicle and ready for its ride into space. This is a great milestone
in Planetary Society history: we have produced a fully qualified spacecraft
and have it (figuratively) on the launch pad.

Of course, we are not on a launch pad at all. Cosmos 1 sits on a rocket
about to be placed into a submarine. The rocket Volna (“wave” in Russian) is
an intercontinental ballistic missile with its warheads replaced with our
spacecraft and the orbital-insertion motor that will lift it to the
outermost edge of Earth’s atmosphere.

Now we are ready to ride a wave into space.

But the hard work is certainly not over. Right now, we are scrambling to
prepare for mission operations. One aspect of flying a low-cost mission is
that we can’t hire extra people and field parallel teams. Until this month,
everyone was busy with spacecraft development and had no time to work on the
multifaceted aspects of mission operations. The stations in our worldwide
tracking network are working together for the first time, and we must
coordinate all our activities over 20 time zones and in two different
languages.

Cosmos 1 is a complex spacecraft; with it, we are trying things that have
never been done before. Delivering a spacecraft to the rocket is of course
only a milestone along the way, but still one of which we are proud.

Our hats are off to all the teams involved, not only for the individual
tasks accomplished, but also for the unprecedented cooperation and
coordination among interests ranging from the media (our sponsor, Cosmos
Studios) to military (the Russian Navy.) In between, we have The Planetary
Society, the Lavochkin Association, the Space Research Institute of the
Russian Academy of Sciences, several American and Russian organizations, and
the many individuals who have helped. We also acknowledge the Makeev Rocket
Design Bureau of Miass, Russia who built the Volna. Now, the Russian Navy
will launch it. And we never even would have reached the launch of Cosmos 1
without the support and enthusiasm of Planetary Society members.

The world’s space agencies are watching our mission with great interest.
Whatever happens in the next few weeks, we know we have already contributed
to the development of a new propulsion technology that can revolutionize
space travel—even as far as the stars.

• Previous message: LARRY KLAES: "SETI public: Pioneer Anomaly and the Kuiper Belt mass distribution"

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu Jun 16 2005 - 08:15:18 PDT