The privately funded US-Russian craft, which gets its power from a special solar sail, disappeared after its launch Tuesday from the Barents Sea.

But US experts say Cosmos 1 is still giving out a weak signal and its fate remained unknown.

Project director, Louis Friedman, president of the Planetary Society, told AFP "There is some possibility that Cosmos 1 won't be lost."

"The Russian space agency has made the conclusion that the spacecraft is lost because the motor failed," he said. "We've seen some counterindications to that, because there is some very weak spacecraft data" that appear to be coming from Cosmos 1.

Friedman said his team was examining the signals and it could take several days to find out what happened to the four million dollar craft.

"I don't think the final chapter is written - at least we are not ready yet to make that conclusion," he said.

The Planetary Society said that the weak signal could mean that the craft was flying at a much lower orbit than planned.

Cosmos 1 was launched on a Russian Volna rocket on Tuesday from a submarine in the Barents Sea.

The 100 kilogramme (220 pound) craft had been scheduled to reach an 800 kilometer (500 mile) high orbit.

But Russia's Roskosmos space agency said Cosmos 1 was lost due to a failure involving the rocket.

Roskosmos said on its Internet site that the first stage of the three-stage rocket failed 83 seconds after launch. The Volna is an inter-continental ballistic missile converted to deploy small spacecraft into low earth orbit.

A satellite did not pick up a signal from Cosmos, "which signifies its loss," Igor Dygalo, a spokesman for the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet, told AFP in Moscow.

Russia's Itar-Tass news agency cited a senior source involved in the project as saying the spacecraft had probably come down somewhere near New Zealand.

The Planetary Society, based in Pasadena, California, said monitoring stations in Russia's Far East and Majuro in the Marshall Islands had picked up signals from Cosmos 1.

Built by Russia's Lavochkin Association and the Russian Academy of Science's Space Research Institute, the bulk of the funds came from the Cosmos Studios in the United States. The launch was funded by the Russian government.

Cosmos 1 carried eight triangular sails made of tough, reflective and ultra-thin Mylar, one-fifth the thickness of a plastic trash bag.

Its sails were together supposed to form a mirror 30 meters (100 feet) in diameter that would absorb energy to propel it at increasingly high speeds.

The scientists behind Cosmos 1 had hoped to prove that rays of light could provide a limitless energy propulsion source for space voyages.

Experts said that, theoretically, after three years the craft could reach a speed of more than 100,000 kilometers (60,000 miles) an hour.

Two previous attempts to launch Russian solar craft, in 1999 and 2001, ended in failure.

NASA is designing its own solar spaceship capable of carrying 240 kilograms (531 pounds), with a sail the size of a football field.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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