posted 02-24-2009 04:59 PM               

For starters, I have gathered everything I could, from books (the Halls, Siddiqis and Harveys), the web (a few hundred pictures, mostly from European sources), and audiovisual footage. I'm even starting to decipher the Russian language, which will undoubtedly open me up to an upper level of documentation in this subject matter.

Anyone familiar with Vostok/Voskhod hardware and procedures? Sources for documentation? I'm eager to exchange notes!

In the meantime, here's the first draft for a navigation panel mock-up presentation:

I started by making a composite image of the best shots I had found of the panel. I then lowered the contrast and boosted the luminosity of the picture to make it very pale, yet decipherable. After, I traced the boundary lines in black, and then tweaked the luminosity and contrast settings back such that the original image paled away, leaving only my black traces. I finally printed it to scale and stuck it to a sheet of Coroplast.

I'd like to end up making a 3D, photo-realist mock-up of the panel as one way to exhibit this beauty. I'd like to have a killer exhibit for April 12's jubilee!

posted 02-27-2009 12:23 PM               

• The Soviets used metric screws and fixtures? The four screws holding the Globus to the frame of the Navigation panel are metric screws, I got replacements right off the shelf at Home Depot.

• As I expected, the instrument is mostly a mechanical work of art. All of the adjusments are mechanical, and the only electrics and electronics found are a motor (used only to fast-forward the indicator from nadir position to landing position), a variable resistance going once around each orbit, two multipole relay-type blade-contacts sending the position of cam-wheels, those being wired to a small PCB with four diodes and three resistors -- two of those being soldered in parallel. And a single solenoid actuator: it received pulses from a sequencer outside of the assembly every five seconds or so, and it turned a sprocketwheel by a fraction of a turn — the movements cascades to the whole instrument from that single actuator. That's it! Click on the pics.

• On the first picture above, one can see some paper bullets with numbers applied on the globe at some points around the USSR -- most unrelated to a nominal landing — which lead me to believe that this is a training unit — albeit maybe it flew unmanned before being assigned to a training station.

posted 03-01-2009 07:21 PM               

The spacecraft bus voltage is 28v, but you might not want to try running this as there might be a step down transformer somewhere.

Many times in orbit, the cosmonaut was given a correction index (knob at the right side) to adjust the position.

The paper indicators are valuable info - probably communications stations (permanent and movable) for either the Zarya or Vesna system. The fact we see 2 near Ethiopia is because the TDU retrofire was over Madagascar to settle the spacecraft near the primary recovery area in Kazakhstan.

There is a checklist called "Instruction to Cosmonauts" which was updated several times during these programs, but it is not available. Amazingly it is only a small booklet.

The 24 panel lights are very enigmatic. I have tried to find these for years to no avail. We only know several of these labels through circumstantial reports. (Spusk I,II, III, Gas on Descent II, Fire, Radiation in SA, Prepare to Catapult, Tones alarm, and several others) The breakdown of colors of these lights is more consistent (10 red, 6 yellow, and 8 green, I believe)

I have a collection of panel images, some of them close up. Please contact me. May I also recommend the works of Yuri Tiapchenko - on Alexander Zhelznyakov's Encyclopedia Cosmonautica site under "Pult Cosmonauts".

Kindly, What are the outside dimensions of this panel as it faces the viewer ? This is new information. This will allow extrapolation of the sizes of other panels.

posted 11-01-2009 11:55 PM               

Another notable artifact is an Apollo sextant. An Apollo 17 lunar sample is also one of the items loaned by the Smithsonian Institution.

posted 04-07-2011 01:48 AM               

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first human space flight by Yuri Gagarin, a spacecraft instrument from the era will be presented at Cosmodôme in Laval, Québec, during its "Gagarine Day" activities. This will be this artifact's first public presentation in Quebec, and maybe even in Canada. It exemplifies USSR's technological dedication towards its early mastery of space exploration. Other Soviet and Russian artifacts will also be shown.

The most significant item presented is a navigation instrument meant for the first manned Soviet rockets. Called "Globus", it's a miniature terrestrial globe whose displacement exhibits the movement of the spacecraft around its orbit, moved by the most exquisite horological mechanism, the size of a big toaster. The "Globus" shown on Gagarin Day is almost identical to the instrument facing the heroic cosmonaut during his historic hundred and eight minutes in space.

Visitors will be able to observe it closely and witness all of its wheels in movement, second after second: it is truly an early precursor to the GPS! This artifact and others will be presented by their collector, a fan of astronautics from Montreal. A teacher by trade, he will share with visitors of all ages the fascinating genesis of this great human adventure of the twentieth century – fifty years almost to the day after the historic space flight of April 12th, 1961.

There will be animations in both English and French, and maybe in Russian too! Indeed, the Russian community of Canada is part of "Gagarin Day" and will be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of this momentous event from its national history.

The activity "Gagarin and the Globus" is available for institutions.

WHERE:
Cosmodôme
2150, Autoroute des Laurentides
Laval (Québec)

WHEN:
Sunday, April 11th, 2011
from 10am to 13am

posted 04-11-2011 09:36 AM               

Just by looking at pristine packs of ASTP cigarettes, adult Russian expatriates who have stopped smoking ages ago remembered vividly the taste of those first (Philip Morris) Western cigarettes!...

posted 10-16-2011 10:57 PM               

The "Retro" indicator light on the Vostok and Voskhod Globus lights up when the instrument displays the projected landing point (versus the point to the nadir of the spacecraft, which is the normal operation of the instrument).

It turns out that my Globus contains only two electrical actuators:

1. The main electrical actuator is a solenoid actuating a ratchet hook, which turns a wheel, one tooth at a time. The movement then cascades down to the rest of the mechanism: this is what actually makes the globe and the latitude-longitude indicators do their work. The electrical impulses for the solenoid probably came from a sequencer located in the instrument unit of Vostok/Voskhod. My hunch is that impulses came every 1 to 5 seconds, but I have yet to test this, and also to asses if said frequency was fixed through the flight or if it was modulated according to sensors' signal: it being modulated according to current altitude would make sense. Radar-based, precise and discrete measurement of altitude was within the 1960's state of the art. To integrate it into the mechanical computing would be taking advantage of Kepler's second law of planetary motion.

   I have found the two pins connected to the solenoid, I have made myself a quick-and-dirty female plug from a wine cork, with nineteen tiny drilled holes and small-gauge, single-strand copper wires inserted in the proper holes. I actuate this manually from a 18v source (two 9v batteries), which works fine even though the rated voltage used for Voskhod is 28v.

2. A second electrical actuator, to be used only before the deorbit burn, is a motor which is used to advance the instrument's position from "Present ground position at spacecraft's nadir" to "Ground position of expected landing if retrorockets were activated presently." The switch for that function was found on the switch panel, the only other panel in the Vostok and Voskhod other than the navigation panel in which the Globus is found. I won't fiddle with this motor until I find out more about it. But I don't care so much for that function. Just manually going "click, click, click" on an old Morse code transmission key and "orbiting" the Earth in slow-motion looking to this 6-inch globe... Hearing the solenoid doing its own clock, clock, which was a prevalent sound in Vostok and Voskhod, according to cosmonauts... What a thrill!

posted 05-02-2017 08:04 PM               

Francios has done just a magnificent job not only presenting the artifact but also unmasking its history and hope to help preserve/build upon that legacy going forward.

posted 12-02-2017 04:30 PM               

Under closer examination of the sphere, its separation surprisingly revealed internal electronics shared in the below image. I've not yet established the electronics function.

These devices (and associated Russian engineering) just continue to amaze.

posted 01-01-2018 02:30 PM               

The globe was received with other components of the dissected IMP (apparently a derivative employed aboard Salyut). Below image comparisons indicate these all more closely fit the architecture of the later generation Globus IMP utilized on board Soyuz (with some differences).

Both the the complete Voshkod and Soyuz globus Earth spheres appear to have been designed to separate like the stand alone globe. So it would not surprise me if similar electronics exist within both the earlier and later gen navigation devices.

posted 01-02-2018 09:48 PM               

And again, even in later IMPs, there's no way an inclination of more than a few degrees could be exhibited in the constraints of the casing with any kind of protrusions off the poles.

Look carefully to your Voskhod IMP: you'll see!