Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Lev Matveyevich Zeleny, professor, scientific director of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the first stage of the Russian lunar program, recently celebrated his 75th birthday. He has been engaged in space exploration with the help of automatic devices since the 1990s. It all started with the Interball project, dedicated to the Earth's magnetosphere. Then there was the very successful ExoMars 2016 mission. But there were also failures. The scientist spoke about his path to science, the main achievements and the dream of mankind about distant planets in an interview. Interviewed by Tatyana Pichugina.
— Lev Matveyevich, from the very beginning did you want to become a physicist, explore space? When did you become interested in the exact sciences?
“It all happened quite by accident. We lived in the very center of Moscow, in the Palashevsky market area, in the apartment of my grandmother, who was a surgeon. I studied at a regular school and quickly got into a yard company, there were drives to the police. Meanwhile, my math teacher noticed me. She talked to her parents, and I was enrolled in a mathematical circle at Moscow State University. There I first of all began to prove Fermat's theorem, got carried away. I decided to go to the mathematical school number 444 in Izmailovo. At first they didn’t take it because of the four in behavior, but then they nevertheless accepted it.
After school, I was encouraged to enter the Mekhmat of Moscow State University, but I wanted to go to Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Although he knew physics worse than mathematics. I got a B on my entrance exams. There was a problem about the Mach cone, which was solved in one line, and I wrote a functional for three pages. Nevertheless, this was enough and I became a student at the Faculty of Aerophysics and Space Research.
From the third year he worked at the secret Institute of Thermal Processes, now it is the Keldysh Center, he was engaged in nuclear engines for rockets. But here in my destiny there were drastic changes, and this is connected with that time. It was 1969, the «thaw» was ending, on the contrary, «tightening the screws» began. Somehow, my friend and I decided to listen to the performances of poets on Mayakovsky Square on April 14th. They gathered there every year on the day of Mayakovsky's death, read poetry, and they never forbade it, but that year they dispersed it. Although we just stood aside, we were also taken to the police station. We wrote down the last names and place of study. width=»600″ data-crop-height=»291″ data-source-sid=»not_rian_photo» class=»lazyload» width=»1920″ height=»932″ decoding=»async» />
< br />
Then the students of the Physicotechnical Institute became involved in an action with leaflets «Two Thousand Words» in the Palace of Congresses. The special services were collecting a big file and recalled this case in April. My friend and I were threatened with expulsion. But, since we studied well and did not participate in political activities, we were faced with a choice: expulsion or transfer to the newly created department of space research, which was not closed.
How lucky we were, it became clear much later. The development of a nuclear engine for space gradually reached a dead end. There was nowhere to test it, it did not work out. Only now, after half a century, they are returning to this topic.
And then I got a job at the new Institute for Space Research, took up plasma physics and immersed myself in reading literature about the solar wind. Later, when Roald Zinnurovich Sagdeev was appointed director, his student Albert Abubakirovich Galeev also came there, and I became his graduate student. Our first joint article was about magnetic storms.
Were they discovered in the 1960s thanks to satellites?
—The magnetic field was measured back in the 19th century. Its strong change was called a magnetic storm. But why this happens, they did not understand. This had to be explained. We have established that energy accumulates in the «tail» of the magnetosphere in current sheets, and then it is released explosively.
— When did you realize what role the magnetosphere plays for life?
— With the discovery of a constant flow of plasma from the Sun — that same solar wind. It turned out that our magnetosphere keeps it, does not let it to the Earth. The boundary between the solar wind and the magnetosphere is called the magnetopause. However, this does not mean that we are completely closed from the influence of the Sun. Our magnetic shell is sensitive to everything that happens in the solar wind. In particular, because of it, the so-called magnetotail is formed — this is a kind of reservoir in which energy accumulates.
Alexander Chizhevsky was the first to write about the fact that the Sun influences many processes on Earth and determines space weather. I am a big fan of his ideas. Since the 1970s, satellites of the Prognoz series have been launched in the Soviet Union to study solar activity.
The latest in this series are the devices of the Interball project, which began in 1995. It was a kind of echo of the Interkosmos program. 18 countries participated — Bulgarians, Czechs, all our friends from the Soviet era. We were the first to propose a multi-satellite system, because in space it is necessary to measure processes at several points at once. I became the project coordinator. There were four satellites in total: one satellite-subsatellite pair in a very elongated orbit, and the second similar pair in a close auroral one. I can say that this is the best time in my life. Every day new data came from our satellites, and not just from American and Japanese ones. crop-ratio=»0.6669921875″ data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»400″ data-source-sid=»not_rian_photo» class=»lazyload» width=»1920″ height=»1281″ decoding =»async» />
— Should the Resonance project article be continued?
— Yes, four satellites in the near magnetosphere. But the mission remained on paper. After the «Interball» we, as co-researchers, were invited to the European project «Cluster». He also has an interesting and difficult fate. The first launch was in 1996, and all four satellites were lost in the crash of the Ariane rocket. At the same time, an accident occurred with our apparatus «Mars-96». I have not dealt directly with Mars, but my colleagues have put a lot of effort into it. Unfortunately, there was no sequel. And the «Cluster» was reborn like a phoenix, the Europeans repeated the devices, and the satellites were launched in 2000 on Russian rockets. We are actively involved in this project, many articles have been published.
In the middle of the 2000s, I got involved in a completely different topic — planetary exploration. Participated in the preparation of the Phobos-Grunt mission. Got carried away. Moreover, there was a pause in solar-terrestrial physics itself: it seemed that all the main problems had been solved.
— Alas, «Phobos-Grunt» repeated its fate » Mars-96″. Even we, journalists, suffered this failure hard.
— I remember Boris Slutsky, who dedicated these lines to his friend Kulchitsky: «I do not regret that he was killed. I regret that they were killed too early . Not in the third world, but in the second.» If the device had died on approach to Mars, it would not have been so insulting, but it did not fly away from the Earth.
We were returning from Baikonur together with Mikhail Yakovlevich Marov. By the way, he recently turned 90 years old. Seeing our sad faces, the head of Roscosmos, Vladimir Popovkin, approached us and told us about the European Space Agency's invitation to participate in the ExoMars mission. «Agree?» asked. I say: «Of course. Only so that Russia's participation is symmetrical.» In 2013, we signed an agreement, and in 2016, the first spacecraft flew to Mars with our instruments and has been successfully operating there ever since.
Unfortunately, it was not possible to implement the second stage, but this is quite recent history…
In the same years, in the 2010s, the Chibis-M microsatellite for lightning research, created with the money of the Academy of Sciences, became a consolation for us. Thanks to the then President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Yuri Sergeevich Osipov. It was launched in 2012 from the ISS. «Chibis-M» worked for a year and a half and gave very interesting results, although initially it was considered only scientific and educational.
1 of 2
2 of 2 » data->
1 of 2
2 of 2 » data->
— What was the state of our lunar program then?
— After the end of the lunar race, the group working in in this direction, moved to the Academic Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry named after V. I. Vernadsky (GEOKHI). Academician Eric Galimov developed a research program to find out the internal structure of the Moon, with a particular interest in the lunar core.
There is still no generally accepted idea of how our natural satellite was formed. I show ten different models in the reports. Galimov, following Laplace and Otto Schmidt, believed that the Moon and the Earth formed almost simultaneously from the same protoplanetary cloud. For this model, the core size is important. The idea of the mission was to drop several penetrators with seismometers to the surface, which would transmit data on seismic vibrations. It's like a CT scan. So, for example, they act on Earth to study its internal structure. But it is impossible to make the necessary devices even abroad.
Meanwhile, data on the polar moon were accumulating. The device, created in the laboratory of Igor Mitrofanov — LEND — worked on board the NASA LRO orbiter. He showed that there might be water ice at the poles. We were the first to talk about the importance of the polar regions of the Moon. The Space Council supported us, GEOHI too. In 2010, they made a report at a meeting chaired by the Prime Minister. So the lunar program changed direction — from the internal structure to the polar regions. It is necessary to understand not only where the water came from, but also how to use it. Water is a valuable resource. This is the basis for the moon bases. From it you can get fuel, then the Moon will become, as the pilots say, a «jump airfield» on the way to Mars. This, by the way, is reflected in the recent very entertaining series «For the Sake of All Mankind», filmed in the alternative history genre.
— The whole history of astronautics has passed before you, you saw how ideas about space are changing. It is now clear that man is actually locked up on Earth. Apparently, we will have to say goodbye to the dream of manned exploration of distant planets. Even on the Moon, we can stay safely for a maximum of a few days, what to say about Mars. Isn't it sad?
“On Mars, by the way, we will be better off than on the Moon. But the question is painful. Stanislav Lem's book «Return from the Stars» is about this. It describes humanity, which has ceased to be interested in space and has begun to degenerate.
Space is hostile to us, that's clear. No matter how we develop technology, we will not be able to travel to the stars without antigravity. In addition, a person consumes a lot of resources, and even a flight to Mars is problematic. Not to mention the radiation hazard.
Suppose they build a lunar village, burying it in regolith. To live there, with a small lunar gravity, you need to do heavy physical exercises for several hours a day. Without this, after a year on the Moon, it will no longer be possible to return to Earth — the bones will not withstand. The flight of a man to Mars is, obviously, a one-way trip for the time being. Therefore, it is logical to study distant planets with the help of automata. How far artificial intelligence and robotics will be able to replace humans is still a question, but the prospects are great.
However, not everything fits into the logic. A person needs extreme tasks, points of application of available forces, he needs a search, overcoming himself. Not for a practical purpose, but for the moral climate in society. I think manned astronautics will be preserved as proof of human capabilities. And there will be people on Mars, no matter what, and maybe even be able to build greenhouses with apples…