If you find a piece of this in your backyard, Louis Friedman of The Planetary Society would like to talk with you.  Please call 626-793-5100.


Cosmos 1. Illustration by Rick Sternbach,
The Planetary Society (c).

Cosmos 1 was supposed to be orbiting the earth right now, propelled solely (ha, ha) by light.  Apparently even sunshine hitting you creates a tiny amount of pressure--and given the huge size of Cosmos 1's eight 5-micron-thin aluminized reinforced Mylar sails, mission coordinators theorized that by adusting the sails towards the sun every time the craft circled the earth, the craft would slowly but steadily gain speed, reaching 100,000 mph in three years.  The purpose of this privately-funded, four million dollar mission was really just to see if the thing would work.

Unfortunately, the Volna launch rockets (converted SS-N-18 Soviet ICBMs, if anyone cares) have turned out to be somewhat of lemons.  A 2001 suborbital test flight, with only two sails, failed when a Volna computer glitch failed to release the spacecraft.  Now the Volna which launched Cosmos 1 last Tuesday (June 21st) appears to have flown the craft off into the horizon, as opposed to space.  But since U.S. law strictly governs the transfer of militarily interesting information between the U.S. and other countries (in this case the Volna missles), everyone is waiting for the Russian defense ministry to report on their debris search.

The good news about all this is that with all the Russian agencies involved, from the Volna rockets to the spacecraft contractor (NPO Lavochkin) to the Russian nuclear submarine that launched Cosmos 1 from the Barents Sea, we may not need to worry about any serious ballastic threat from the former Soviet Union.

See a video of the launch at this blog.  Read down far enough and you'll find that Bill Nye is The Planetary Society's vice pres.

[In other news:  Scientists kill dogs and bring them back to life;  Global warming actually creates more ice; and the NASA people think they can see a hydrocarbon lake on Titan.]