This reaction had been attempted before, but without success; for this 1998 attempt, the JINR had upgraded all of its equipment to detect and separate the produced atoms better and bombard the target more intensely. A single atom of flerovium, decaying by alpha emission with a lifetime of 30.4 seconds, was detected. The decay energy measured was 9.71 MeV, giving an expected half-life of 2–23 s. This observation was assigned to the isotope flerovium-289 and was published in January 1999. The experiment was later repeated, but an isotope with these decay properties was never found again and hence the exact identity of this activity is unknown. It is possible that it was due to the metastable isomer 289mFl, but because the presence of a whole series of longer-lived isomers in its decay chain would be rather doubtful, the most likely assignment of this chain is to the 2n channel leading to 290Fl and electron capture to 290Nh, which fits well with the systematics and trends across flerovium isotopes, and is consistent with the low beam energy that was chosen for that experiment, although further confirmation would be desirable via the synthesis of 294Lv in the 248Cm(48Ca,2n) reaction, which would alpha decay to 290Fl. The team at RIKEN reported a possible synthesis of the isotopes 294Lv and 290Fl in 2016 through the 248Cm(48Ca,2n) reaction, but the alpha decay of 294Lv was missed, alpha decay of 290Fl to 286Cn was observed instead of electron capture to 290Nh, and the assignment to 294Lv instead of 293Lv and decay to an isomer of 285Cn was not certain.