Planetary spacecraft

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By Anatoly Zak; last update: August 23, 2007

TsNIIMash projects

The early studies of possible missions beyond Mars orbit were initiated at the end of the 1960s in the 12th Department of TsNIIMash, the leading research institution of the Soviet rocket industry.

This work coincided with and possibly it was influenced by the US projects, which eventually led to Pioneer-10 and 11 and Voyager 1-2 missions. Led by Dr. Leo Golovin, the 12th Department, also known as Department of Spacecraft, was responsible for conceptualizing the ideas, which could be adopted for development by the industry, providing government funding.

During the second half of the 1960 and beginning of the 1970s, Golovin's collective put forward a number of ambitious proposals of unmanned missions to planets, including Mercury and Jupiter, the project of manned expedition to Mars, lunar base and big orbital station on the Earth orbit. During this work a number of scaled models of the hardware was built to represent the concepts developed at TsNIIMash. Unlike common misconception that these models were used in testing, the veterans of the TsNIIMash insist that they were no more than promotional materials prepared for the meetings of high-ranking officials at the Ministry of General Machine Building, which oversaw the rocket industry in the USSR since 1966.

Lavochkin projects

During 1986 and 1987, Vladimir Perminov, a leading developer of the interplanetary probes at Lavochkin design bureau in Moscow prepared a Scientific and Technical Report on the possibility of the unmanned missions to Jupiter, Saturn and Sun. The report considered the possible design of the spacecraft, trajectories and other engineering issues of the project.

Based on this work, Lavochkin launched a preliminary study (NIR) code-named Tsiolkovskiy with the primary goal of sending unmanned probe toward the Sun. The spacecraft would be powered by Radioisotope Thermal Generators (RTG), which use radioactive plutonium to produce electrical energy onboard. Large 4-meter antenna would be used to transmit data from the spacecraft to the ground control stations.

The major requirement for the project was the probe's ability to flyby within 5-7 of the Sun's radiuses. In order to survive tremendous heat present at this distance from the Sun, the engineers proposed two alternative shapes for the spacecraft body, one as a narrow cone and another as a disc. In both cases, the narrow edges of the craft would face the Sun to reduce the effect of the heat. With all the measures in place, the temperature on the craft's surfaces was still expected to reach 2,500 degrees C. A special thermal protection made of vanadium was designed to shield the probe's internal systems.

According to the plan, in 1995-96, the Proton rocket would send a 2-ton spacecraft toward Jupiter, where the planet's powerful gravity field would "sling shot" the probe back toward the Sun in the so-called gravity-assisted maneuver. As it was passing Jupiter, the cameras onboard the spacecraft were expected to conduct observations of Jupiter and its moons and a descent capsule with science instruments would be ejected into Jupiter's atmosphere.

The capsule, with the maximum weight of 500 kilograms, was expected to experience acceleration of 1,500 G during its descent into the atmosphere of Jupiter. A centrifuge capable of imitating the loads of the descent in the Jupiter's atmosphere was built on Lavochkin premises in Moscow. However, the spacecraft itself has never gone beyond a development stage, as federal funds for space program started evaporating at the turn of the 1990s.

After Jupiter flyby the craft would continue on toward the Sun. A derivative of the spacecraft could be also sent toward Saturn and beyond.

After a long hiatus caused by economic problems of the post-Soviet period, NPO Lavochkin's engineers could at least dream again about deep-space missions. In August 2007, management of the company revealed plans for a number of missions beyond Earth orbit, including the Asteroid-Grunt and Kometa-Grunt projects, which could collect soil samples from an asteroid and a comet respectively. Both probes would be based on the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, then scheduled for launch in 2009.

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