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 turned on; nevertheless, the first and, it seems to me, interesting data have already begun to arrive. 16. For example, included in the project's scientific mission were Soviet-French experiments on the study of gamma radiation from solar flares and gamma bursts from neutron stars. Conducting these measurements simultaneously aboard near-earth satellites and interplanetary probes will make it possible to locate very precisely space sources of gamma bursts and to make stereoscopic measurements of solar flares (indeed, now, besides the Phobos vehicles, gamma bursts are also being recorded by two American satellites--SMM and Pioneer Venus). On the flight from Earth to Mars, the Phobos vehicles' instruments were working continuously and were recording gamma bursts over an interval of 1-3 days. Thanks to the high sensitivity of the detectors and the use of microprocessors for preliminary processing of the data, it has been possible to measure the time structure of the bursts with a resolution of around 1 ms. It is already clear that the bursts' spectra have a complex, multicomponent pattern and change in a matter of fractions of a second. After joint processing has been performed on the data obtained from all the space vehicles, the experimenters hope to determine the location of unknown radiation sources (both in the sky and on the sun's disk) with an accuracy of several seconds of arc. 17. And I would like to talk about one more result obtained, since it concerns plasma physics--a field that is closest to my scientific interests. The Phobos vehicles' instruments have located the intersection of the shock wave front at the boundary of the earth's magnetosphere, and the intersection was a repeated one. This affected the relatively slow motion of the spacecraft in such a fashion that it seemed as if the shock wave front would run ahead and then drop back. As a result, we have obtained approximately a dozen such intersections. It must be said that, in and of itself, the intersection of the shock wave front is not of much interest on earth. But, for us, this was an extraordinarily important test which proved that the instruments aboard the spacecraft were operating properly. We are now firmly convinced that the equipment's sensitivity is so high that we have reached a world-class level in plasma measurements. I am talking about the APV-F instrument--the plasma wave analyzer. 18. Similar such instruments were also on the Vega probes, but the situation was different at that time: the plasma activity of Halley's Comet was so great that we were not the least bit concerned about whether the sensitivity of the detectors was adequate or not. But in the Phobos project, a number of very delicate tasks had been set up which require that the equipment have enhanced sensitivity. The
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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.