[FPSPACE] Astrofizika

[DwayneDay]

-----Original Message-----
From: cliched at earthlink.net

>I should point out that the new information on Astrofizika is largely 
>due to the efforts of Bart Hendrickx who published a great (2-part) 
>article on the history of the Meteor system in _Novosti kosmonavtiki_ 
>recently (nos. 6  and 7 in 2004)

>Kudos to Bart for managing to track down some amazing information via 
interviews with key participants.

*********

Yep, kudos.

For a little more info on the web, see:

http://host.planet4589.org/space/jsr/jsr.html

This is by Jonathan McDowell.

Excerpt:

*Historical note: Astrofizika

The latest issue of the Russian magazine Novosti Kosmonavtiki (NK), in an
interesting article on the history of the Meteor weather satellite
system, provides the first details on the mysterious satellite
Kosmos-1066 launched in December 1978. Kosmos-1066 was identified by
Igor Lissov and Sergey Voevodin on the FPSPACE list in 1997 as being the
cover name for the article 11F653 spacecraft 'Astrofizika', but we
didn't know what it was for. The Astrofizika name suggested a possible
astrophysics payload but no science results had been reported. The new
NK article quotes Yuriy Trifonov, director of VNII Elektromekhaniki, the
design organization for the Meteors, as saying that Kosmos-1066 was
based on Meteor-1 and carried special optical instruments for the
observation of artificially created `light sources' on Earth; the craft
carried an SPD-50 electric thruster like those on Meteor-Priroda to
allow its orbit to be adjusted to pass over the experiment sites.  The
Astrofizika satellite is believed to have operated for almost two years.

NK speculate the experiments may have been military in nature, and I
note that the main USSR organization for the development of directed
energy weapons was called NPO Astrofizika. Maybe the satellite was
measuring laser signal strength from an experimental laser at the
Terra-3 facility to study propagation energy losses, for future
application to beam weapons, or something of that kind - I emphasize,
for the benefit of those inclined to overhype, that I am not suggesting
an actual beam weapon delivering significant energy on target, just a
jumped-up satellite tracking laser.