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.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
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electric currents, which couple the electromagnetic field in the magnetosphere 's tail with the conducting ionosphere. Along with these experiments, studies will be made in the Interbol project of the plasma and the magnetic structures of the far regions of the magnetospheric tail. In order to do this, plans have been made to use instruments on board the Relikt-2 astrophysical satellite.
9. Furthermore, in answer to your question, I want to note that our ideas about the solar system's planets have changed considerably. Now we have an opportunity for making direct contact with them. And this applies primarily to Venus, which we began to study using space technology resources more than 25 years ago, over which time we have sent 18 spacecraft to it. We managed to obtain, first, black-and-white images and, later, color images of the planet's surface at the landing sites of these craft. The elemental composition of the soil was determined in situ, i.e., a quite complicated technical problem had been solved. The use of radars made it possible to obtain a radar map of the planet's surface and to determine its typical morphological features. A great deal of attention has been paid to the investigation of the atmosphere and the cloud layer on Venus. A lot of new and interesting data--not just about Venus, but also about Halley's Comet--was obtained during the Vega mission, but that has already been recounted in detail in PRIRODA, and I will not dwell on it. 1reset> Thus, summing up certain results, I can say that the study of the planets will remain a very important area of research for several decades to come; of this, I have no doubt.
10. Astronomy, in going out into space, has received an opportunity to see the universe in a new way: ultraviolet and x-ray observations have been added to the observations in the optical and radio frequency ranges, and { quanta are being recorded very reliably. At this very minute, the x-ray telescopes of the Kvant observatory are making observations of the supernova which exploded in 1987 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. For the first time, astronomers can investigate directly the processes which occur, it can be said, at the nearest approaches to neutron stars and black holes. 2
11. [Correspondent] In your opinion, what has space research given and what might it give to the other fields of science? And, in connection with this--is it possible to speak even today of some kind of practical return from the biological or, for example, production experiments in space?
12. [Sagdeyev] From my point of view, the biological experiments are an independent field of space science. First of all, they have made it possible to get an idea about the capability of the human body, or generally any living thing, to exist and function in zero-gravity Not linked to a story yet.
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.