Zenith (satellite)

Return capsule with visible camera openings

The Zenit satellites were several hundred photographic reconnaissance satellites of the Soviet Union .

description

The structure of the satellite resembled the spacecraft Vostok of manned space travel . It contained a spherical return capsule with a diameter of 2.3 meters. After a deployment of one to two weeks, this part of the parachute returned to earth and the photographs were recovered.

literature

• Peter A. Gorin: Zenit - The First Soviet Photo-Reconnaissance Satellite. In: Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 50 (1997), 441-448.
• Dmitri Ilyich Koslow: Konstruirovanie avtomaticheskikh kosmicheskikh apparatov. Moscow: Mashinostroenie, 1996. ISBN 978-5-217-02657-9

Web links

• Zenit and Zenit-2 in the Encyclopedia Astronautica (English)
• Sven Grahn: Description of the first , second and third generation
• Buran.ru: history of the satellite (Russian)