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.
“Cooper”5 pages
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1989 ## Document 1 of 3 specialists have no doubts that we will be able to study the shock wave in the vicinity of Mars; but it will be much more interesting to observe how a small satellite, with a diameter of 20 km all told (I am talking about Phobos), moves within the plasma--after all, it will create disturbances of a much lesser intensity. 19. This experiment turned out to be the last one in which Frederic Scarf--the well-known American physicist and researcher of the solar wind and the magnetosphere and a great and long-time friend of our institute--participated. He was also engaged in the Vega project: Phobos became his last creation--Scarf died suddenly, literally several days after the launching of the vehicles. We are now preparing for publication the materials that were obtained. I recall this because it was Scarf who, several years ago, discovered a very interesting graphic method for representing the results of the investigation of plasma oscillations with these types of intersections of shock waves or other similar regions. The idea is a simple one--the spectrum of the electrical and magnetic oscillations which are characteristics of these types of processes lies in the region of what for us are the customary sound waves. Scarf simply converted the electromagnetic noise into sound, and an unusual polyphonic music was obtained--an actual ''sound picture.'' This technique was used for the first time during the investigation of Jupiter's magnetosphere by the Voyager interplanetary probe. I hope that this time we will also reproduce the ''music'' of Mars and Phobos according to Scarf's recipe. 20. [Correspondent] Unfortunately, on 2 September 1988, contact was lost with the Phobos 1 probe. How will this affect the entire research program,and what is being done in connection with this? 21. [Sagdeyev] Of course, this was a heavy blow for us. On 6 September 1988, at 5 pm Moscow time, a telegram with the following content was sent to the members of the international cooperative who were participating in the project: "'The Control Center has informed us that Phobos 1, because of an error in a command, lost its attitude and is not responding to signals from earth. The Control Center is attempting to re-establish contact with the spacecraft. We will keep you informed of the situation." 22. So far, the situation has not changed. All kinds of measures are being taken to re-establish contact with the vehicle. Evidently, it will be very difficult to do this. But, so long as there exists even the slightest theoretical possibility of getting in contact with Phobos 1, such efforts will not cease. 3 23. With regards to the scientific program of research, I would like to remind you that two vehicles are taking part in the project and,
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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.