Искусственная комета

Rocket in the troposphere emits a cloud of sodium vapor or barium, which glow intensely under the influence of sunlight.

Do it at a certain point for research, but also for optical observations of the flight of the spacecraft and determine the parameters of the trajectory.

They were first formed during the flights of the 1st and 2nd Soviet automatic stations "Luna". At the distance of 113 - 150 thousand km of the brightness corresponded to the 4-6-th star magnitude.

Life time at least 15 minutes.

"Bulletin of Academy of Sciences of the USSR" 1959 №10, pp. 6-10:

For visual observation of the missile was provided by the formation of sodium clouds - an artificial comet. 12 September at 21 h 48 m. Moscow time, when the size of the glowing clouds have reached a considerable value, the comet became visible and within 5-6 min. was observed in the constellation of Aquarius with coordinates close to the estimated. The observation was almost all the observatories of the Soviet Union, located in the zone of visibility of the comet, and also some foreign observatories.

The method of artificial comets, proposed by Soviet scientists, brilliantly justified and gave good results for the visual determination of the coordinates of the missile. In addition, said A. V. Topchiev, based on the dynamics of spreading of the cloud will be possible to draw important conclusions about the physical properties of outer space.

In 1958, the Soviet Union to create a sodium cloud in the upper layers of the atmosphere have been used thermite mixture containing metallic sodium. Photometric observations of the rate of diffusion of the sodium region.ka was used to determine the density of the atmosphere.

When burning termite sodium evaporated and couples it is ejected through the exhaust hole in the cylinder. Lithium clouds have the advantage over sodium that they can be photographed in daylight, using filters in small increments bandwidth (narrow—band).

In later works, there were reports that for the study of higher layers of the atmosphere (150-200 km) used of the cloud, obtained by the evaporation of barium or strontium, which has been added a few percent bazouge (silicone, collodion). The combustion of this mixture were allocated, or 0.34 kcal/.g .(Of 1.42 kJ/g). The total time of combustion of the mixture in the container with the nozzle did not exceed 2 s.

In one of the experiments for the creation of a barium cloud at an altitude of 170 km was used, 48 kg of the mixture.

After 1-2 minutes after you create the cloud of a pair of barium divided into two clouds: one neutral, consisting of VAO, and the other of ionized plasma.

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»