A Nave Espacial Progress M-15, Do Projeto Znamya
“I could illuminate a soccer stadium” – if it resulted. The project that NASA coveted, but only the Russians tested, had an extravagant ambition.
On February 4, 1993, Russian Space Agency Roscosmos had a bizarre mission: sending a mirror to space.
The Zenama Project (“Estandarte”, in Portuguese), had as its objective “Illuminate the Arctic Cities of Siberia during the dark months of winter“. Thus explained BBC host Tomorrow’s World, Kate Bellingham, who accompanied the live release, the British channel itself decades later.
In the background, the goal was “Pull” the sun For the Nordic regions of Russia, who spent much of the day without him.
Already in 1923, the German pioneer of the rockets, Hermann Oberth, had proposed this idea in his book The Rocket into Planetary Space. Suggested the creation of a grid colossal adjustable concave mirrors that could be used to reflect sunlight at a concentrated point of the earth.
Later, in the 1970s, Americans also found the idea curious, especially a rocket engineer Krafft Ehricke, who died in the 80’s without completing his idea of putting these mirrors into practice.
At that time, NASA showed interest in the projectbut the times were different – could not get enough funding, and who took the project was the newly exit nation from the old USSR.
For this moment, a Russian scientist called Vladimir Syromiatnikovconsidered a pioneer of aerospace engineering, was investigating if large Reflective solar candles They could be coupled to a spacecraft: if they were linked to a spacecraft, they could use the sun similarly to the way ships use the wind.
Decided to try it. But how, at the time, the budget From the old USSR it was not wide either, decided to adapt the idea.
The reflective solar candles of an orbit spacecraft could, perhaps, mirror. The ship’s thrusters would be used to tilt the candles and keep them in sync with the position of the sun.
The final ambition was to have a structure of up to 36 of these giant mirrors in space with rotation capacity that would allow them to keep the light reflected in the same place.
“On a clear night, the space reflector could illuminate an area the size of a soccer stadium, Bringing some light relief to the long winter nights, ”explained the presenter who, in 1993, reported the long-awaited release of Zenya, in the form of the Progress M-15 spacecraft.
And the experience resulted: the reflected light had a Luminosity approximately equivalent to that of a full moon and created a focus of light about 5 km wide on Earth.
. ”We are pioneers in this area,” said Syromiatnikov to in 1998. “If the experience runs as planned, We propose to send dozens of other ships for space in the future, on a permanent basis. ”
On February 5, 1999, the team then prepared to launch an even larger new mirror for space.
However, this mission, unlike its predecessor, It turned out to be a great failure: The sheets of the reflectors eventually wrapped around the antenna that stretched to send the mirror. The mission control eventually dropped the mirror on earth. He burned the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean the next day.
Valery Lyndin, a mission control spokesman in Moscow, eventually admitted the errors, and since then the extravagant the ambitious idea has not been (yet) recovered.
“Failure was especially painful due to the huge worldwide interest that the experience aroused,” Lyndin said in 1999. “We forgot the old principle of Russian space programs- Do something first and brave you up only after. ”
