"It is still not clear whether the satellite was orbited or not," he said.
The converted carrier rocket Volna was carrying the Cosmos-1, equipped with a solar sail, when it was launched from a Russian submarine in the Barents Sea on June 21 at 23.46 Moscow time.
The engines of the space carrier then died on the 83 second of the flight, a source in the Northern Fleet said.
However, American managers of the Cosmos-1 project said that two tracking stations detected a weak signal from the satellite. According to an official statement from the U.S. Planetary Society, the tracking station in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in the Russian Far East and mobile tracking station in Majuro on the Marshall Islands detected a signal, "which might belong to a space satellite." The Planetary Society is one of the participants.
Cosmos-1 is the world's first attempt to implement the idea of a "solar sail," which is used to propel the satellite using radiation.
Designed to be in orbit for a month, Cosmos-1 was to corroborate Russian and U.S. scientists' calculations and test the hypothesis of flying by means of a solar sail that was first put forward in the 17th century by German astronomer Johann Kepler.
If it had been orbited successfully, the 112-kg satellite was to unfold the Mylar solar sail around itself. The sail consists of eight petals, with a total area of 650 square meters - approximately the size of one and a half basketball courts.
Although it formally belongs to the U.S. Planetary Society, the sail was designed and produced by the Babakin design bureau at the Lavochkin Institute, which is based in the Moscow suburb of Khimki.
An attempt to launch a similar spacecraft from a submarine in the Barents Sea in summer 2001 also failed, as did the attempt in the spring of that same year.
