The speech of the SINP MSU DIrector Professor Mikhail Panasyuk at the round-table of Moscow University and Roscosmos
During July 30-31 a Meeting with the NASA scientists will take place in SINP MSU. The Director of the Institute Professor Mikhail Panasyuk announced it during the round-table of Moscow University and Roscosmos, which was held on June 4. The objective of the Meeting is to discuss the radiation safety of the crews during the long-duration space missions to the Moon and the Mars, along with the International Space Station (ISS). It is a sequential of the dialogue with NASA , started at SINP MSU in December 2013.
"Looking forward to launching space missions, it is necessary to realize that space environment is aggressive not only to the objects produced and launched into space by humans, but also to humans themselves. There are no orbits, space regions and time intervals which are fully radiaionally safe. The problem is how strong these effects are", - the SINP Director told.
SINP MSU is chosen as the Meeting site not by accident: the scientists of the Institute are specialized in the field of space radiation research for over half a century. In 1957 they carried out the first experiment in the near-Earth space with scientific equipment developed by them. Later they began to develop satellites for space research. Among them are "Tatiana", "Tatiana-2", "Youthsat" (joint project with Indian colleagues). On July 8 a small spacecraft "RELEC" was successfully launched from Baykonur launching site, in Autumn 2014 "Nucleon" and in 2015 "Lomonosov" spacecrafts are planned to be launched.
It is important to note that the "Lomonosov" satellite will become the first spacecraft launched to the orbit from a new Russian launching site "Vostochny".
"The "Lomonosov" satellite is a real space laboratory for the studies of the extreme processes in the near-Earth and deep space. For the first time we plan to detect cosmic rays of extremely high energy. Nobody has carried out such space experiments previously", - Mikhail Panasyuk emphasized.
Besides the spacecrafts themselves the scientists of the Institute develop scientific instruments for different space missions: "Kompas-2" (2006), "Coronas-Photon" and "Meteor-M1" (2009), "Elektro-L" (2011), "Chibis" (2012) and GLONASS series satellites from 1990s. Currently scientific instruments developed by the SINP scientists are operated onboard 32 GLONASS spacecrafts.
In order to develop spacecrafts and scientific equipment - from design up to final production - a number of necessary departments were organized in the Institute, icnluding Nuclear-Physics Complex, Space Monitoring Center and Instrumentation Center.