The laboratories will first be docked with the International Space Station (ISS), from which they will venture out for three to four months to carry out experiments. Then they will re-dock with the station to enable cosmonauts to send the samples back to Earth in small-sized landing capsules. With new material loaded, more experiments will be conducted.
The fact that the laboratories will have no crew and there will be fewer working devices on them compared with the orbiting station, will reduce residual micro-accelerations to several millionths of a g (9.8 m/sec). In principle this is possible on a manned station, too, but the difficulties involved are overly challenging. These considerations led to the idea of a new approach combining the advantages of large, manned orbiting spacecraft and automatic probes periodically serviced by cosmonauts when coupled with the mother ship. Such an arrangement will increase the effectiveness of gravitational studies in materials science, fluid physics and biotechnology.
In addition, a five-year program of repeated experiments could be planned to make better use of the life of space laboratories and their on-board experimental equipment. Another advantage will be dispensing with the need for multiple rocket launches, whose costs are rapidly growing. The Russian approach may pave the way for a pilot orbital production system that will turn a profit. Initially, at least, it may explore promising lines of research and test basic technologies.
The Samara Space Rocket Center (TsSKB-Progress), which is developing the orbital laboratories, claims that these will be spacecraft of an entirely new design. At any rate, the Vozvrat-MKA (the abbreviation stands for "small-sized spacecraft") must be novel, since the center has not produced such vehicles before. The second craft has been named the Oka-T (with the T designating "technological").
The idea of a self-contained space vehicle goes back a long time. In the mid-1990s the Central Research Institute of Machine Building (TsNIIMash) developed a craft that came to be known as the MAKOS-T, or the multiple technological automatic space-serviced system, intended to try out promising research areas and test basic space technologies.
In the late 1990s, the Energia Rocket and Space Corporation and the Astro-Space Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Physics Institute jointly developed the concept of a free-floating spacecraft (FFS) able to dock with the Russian segment of the ISS. The vehicle was intended in the first place to address astronomical and, to a lesser degree, geophysical and applied problems.
The FFS was to be orbited close to the ISS so that it could repeatedly approach and dock with the station for refueling to keep the scientific payload functioning, and for repairing and replacing service systems and research apparatus. The need for optics repairs on the orbiting Hubble space telescope has shown the wisdom of using accessible space stations.
The space freighter "Progress", equipped with solar batteries, was used as the engineering basis for the FFS. Its life in orbit was to be over 10 years, and one of its first research objectives was to explore cold matter in the Universe by means of an infrared telescope with a mirror cooled by a cryostat system.
Unfortunately, in those years the Russian space rocket industry was in financial straits, and both projects - the MAKOS-T and FFS - were built in dribs and drabs. Today things are looking up, and, according to the Samara center, one of the laboratories is to be launched in 2012 to fly "in formation with the ISS" and conduct "technological" studies, while the other is to go up in 2015. Federal Space Agency chief Anatoly Perminov confirmed the dates.
The infrared telescope project will be implemented on a specialized space observatory. The reason is that to ensure the unit's required sensitivity (angular resolution), not only must its mirror (12 meters in diameter) be cooled, but also it is necessary to have anti-radiation screens on board to expel heat into space via a radiator. This spacecraft, which has a lot of large, protruding elements, is practically impossible to dock with the orbiting station. Besides, the observatory's scientific mission calls for an orbit of 75,000 kilometers in perigee and 300,000 kilometers in apogee.
The deep-freezing facility will make the telescope, with its 12-meter mirror, the equivalent, in sensitivity terms, of a ground-based radio telescope with an antenna diameter of 3 kilometers, while in interferometer mode it will achieve an angular resolution a thousand times better than interferometers with the maximum possible base (equal to the Earth's diameter).
The Lavochkin Research and Production Association has been named the prime contractor for the project, which is nicknamed Millimetron (from its observation range). The craft is expected to be completed in 2015. Millimetron will thus be the fifth scientific astrophysical project to be listed in the federal program.
The first four include Radioastron, a project to make observations in the radio band (work is well underway on it, and the observatory is scheduled to go into orbit in 2007); the Spektr-UF project, set to go up in 2010, which has been given the status of World Astronomical Laboratory, and will conduct observations in the infrared part of the spectrum; the Spektr-RG X-ray observatory, which in 2005 became a Russian-European project called Spektr RG/e ROSSITA/Lobster, whose space observatory is to be launched in 2008-2009; and finally the Gamma-400 project, still in the development stage.
Yury Zaitsev is an expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Space Research.
