Russian report on Solar Sail failure

Russian engineers have just released a report detailing the reasons that Cosmos 1, the Solar Sail launched on June 21st, failed.

The probe revealed there was enough telemetry data to determine that the Volna's first stage engine did not complete is planned 100-second burn before jettisoning from the rest of the vehicle. Instead, the engine -- powered by nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine -- shut down 82.86 seconds into flight, and the planned separation of the first and second stages did not occur. Officials deemed the engine problems were caused by a "critical degradation in operations capability of the engine turbopump."

Based on this information, there was no way the the solar sail could have acheived orbit. Instead, it likely fell into the Barents Sea a few hundred kilometers east of the launch area near the city of Murmansk.