DETAIL

         

The 30th Anniversary of the first FOTON flight

17 april 2015

On April 16, 2015 it turned 30 since the first FOTON spacecraft, designed and developed by Space Rocket Centre Progress, had successfully been launched. The flight programme was fully implemented; the spacecraft went into the target orbit, worked nominally for 13 days and returned to Earth with scientific results.

FOTON spacecraft grew into unique scientific labs for producing in space semiconducting materials and biopreparations with properties unattainable on Earth and creating new technologies for its production. Need for those experiments began with new space age, when it became necessary to test new structural materials, instruments and whole systems.

Specialists of TsSKB design bureau and Progress production plant (Space Rocket Centre Progress nowadays) created for this purpose unmanned spacecraft FOTON assuming as a basis the structure and hardware of BION spacecraft. The chosen configuration was not a coincidence: BION had a re-entry capsule in which scientific instruments and experimental results could be returned to Earth.

From the very start of the project, FOTON and FOTON-M spacecraft have been developed and produced by Space Rocket Centre Progress.

The experimental results proved to be in demand and 12 FOTONs successfully operated in orbit 1985 through 1999, it means that approximately one spacecraft per year was launched. The flight lasted for 13 to 18 days. The re-entry capsules landed in the target area by means of soft-landing system. During all this time research programme in the spheres of semiconducting and optical materials production, biotechnology, cell biology, outer space factors impact on returned samples and others was implemented onboard FOTON. The experimental outcome enriched the science with new knowledge about technological process flow in space, which further found its application on ground.

Scientists and experts from the French Space Agency started to take part in the experimental program beginning with FOTON-5 (1989). Each year international cooperation in the sphere of space technology only boosted. In 1992 the European Space Agency began to carry out experiments on FOTON. By the end of the nineties the work with ESA became intensive. The foreign scientific hardware was allowed to occupy up to two-thirds of the spacecraft total load and volume.