On the 180th anniversary of the founding of Geofizika–Kosmos Scientific Production Enterprise

Geofizika–Kosmos Scientific Production Enterprise Joint Stock Company (NPP Geofizika–Kosmos), whose history dates from F. Shvabe’s optical workshop, founded in 1837, has 60 years of successful experience in creating space technology. Today this enterprise is the leading organization in Russia occupied in the development and fabrication of optoelectronic orientation and navigation devices for various types of spacecraft.
Almost every Russian spacecraft contains apparatus fabricated at this enterprise. The “Light Vertical,” by means of which the Luna-3 spacecraft was oriented in space, on October 7, 1959 produced the first ever photograph of the back side of the moon; the Grif solar sensor and the Vzor viewing device, operating on the manned space ships Vostok, were used by Yuri Gagarin when he became the first to view the earth from space; devices for controlling the orientation of interplanetary stations were used in the 1960s to study the planets Mars and Venus. We can also mention the following as just a few landmarks: devices for the Soviet lunar program; complexes of sensors for orienting geostationary communication satellites; thirty devices that successfully operated on board the Mir orbital space station for many years (more than 15 years on the basic unit); and unique devices for the Russian space shuttle—the Buran complex. The enterprise developed and produces about 300 types of space devices, mainly for orientation with respect to the sun, the earth, and the stars. More than ten thousand space devices have been fabricated by NPP Geofizika–Kosmos.
Two special issues of Opticheskiı˘ Zhurnal (No. 7 in 1996 and No. 8 in 1998) have been devoted to problems of creating devices for the orientation and navigation of spacecraft. The thematic section of this issue of the journal contains articles by staff members of NPP Geofizika–Kosmos, covering the results of their work in recent years. The section opens with an analytical review article that describes the experience of past developers and the current status of space instrumentation and points out possible ways of solving worthwhile problems.
The research articles that appear here pay special attention to various aspects of the use of modern photodetector arrays in space technology. Several articles acquaint the reader with developments being carried out by specialists at NPP Geofizika–Kosmos. They include both traditional devices for orientation with respect to the stars, the earth, and the sun and a new class of devices—optoelectronic devices for monitoring the position and shape of the reflector of large antenna systems.
The articles that appear in this section present the current status of research into the questions considered in them and are extremely important for optoelectronic space instrumentation but do not exhaust all the problems of this scientific–engineering specialization. We hope that the practice of preparing such thematic sections will allow us to regularly acquaint the readers of the Journal of Optical Technology with research results in the area of optoelectronic devices for the orientation and navigation of spacecraft.