Documents / FOIA release
This CIA-held JPRS report (JPRS-USP-89-007) is an English translation of an interview with academician Roald Sagdeyev. The interview ran in the Soviet magazine PRIRODA in January 1989. Sagdeyev talks about space research achievements, the Interbol project, and the Phobos mission to Mars, including the loss of contact with Phobos 1 in September 1988. He also covers competing designs for Mars 94, manned flight to Mars and democratizing Soviet science. He mentions UFOs only once, recalling a Gosplan lecture where every audience question was about flying saucers.
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## Document 1 of 3 Page 17 solvable problem for our descendants (and I do think that our children's children will live to see this event). 74. [Correspondent] What do you mean by the mystery of Halley's Comet? 75. [Sagdeyev] Today, we can not answer many of the questions about the physics of comets--for example, why this comet behaves so unusually. All it has to do is approach to a given distance from the sun, and then, over the course of several weeks, it continues to 'stew'' with tremendous intensity. Such thermal ''memory'' of a comet is retained for a long time. Inasmuch as we know the heat capacity of its matter, we can make approximate estimations, but, based on them, such an evaporation process is not supposed to last so long. Meanwhile, the comet continues to 'stew,' and much more intensely than it did at the same distance from the sun during its approach. The nature of such asymmetry is not understood. Evidently, there occur on the surface of the comet's core some unknown physical and chemical processes which we have not yet been able to investigate fully. 76. And finally, there is the matter of the comet's origin. It has yet to be solved. In order to do this, it will first of all be necessary to deliver cometary matter to earth. 77. [Correspondent] The next question extends beyond the framework of our present conversation. Keeping in mind the social and political events and the process which are taking place in our country, what is your understanding of democratization and glasnost in science and how, in your opinion, should the USSR Academy of Sciences reorganize its own work? 78. [Sagdeyev] It seems to me that our academy has its own unique and special place in the worldwide family of scientific societies. Once elected into the academy, its members receive such a bouquet of privileges as is not possessed by a member of any other academy in the world. I am not talking simply about additional material goods; in the final analysis, the processes which are going on in the country (including the inevitable inflation) are gradually diminishing this difference and, later, it will be reduced even more. What I am talking about is that, in addition to the respect, which is also enjoyed by members of foreign academies (in fact, election itself is an act of recognition of their services), the members of our academy receive levers for influencing scientific policy as well. As a rule, the academicians head up institutes and, if one of the institutes is unable to secure for itself an academician as the director, it simply considers itself a poor relative. Very frequently, regardless of the scientific merits of the director of
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 21 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.