Soviet Space Tracking Station NIP-16 Yevpatoria

Ukraine / Krym / Zaozerne /
 military, cosmic forces, satellite/space tracking station
Deep space communication station near Yevpatoria. It was originally built in the 60's as support for space probe missions to Mars and Venus and it probably was intended for use in manned Lunar missions.
www.svengrahn.pp.se/radioind/Russdeep/ADU1000.htm

This is how the Americans saw it in the 60's:
www.svengrahn.pp.se/radioind/Yevpatoria/Yevpatoria.html
This is the North station.
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   45°13'9"N   33°9'49"E

Comments

  • Какая нафиг русская космичксекая станция в Крыму?) Это ж Украина
  • служил я там.золотые были времена.
  • Сережа, в 60х годах Россия и Украина были единым целым.
  • это НКАУ
  • это крах и разруха там сейчас...
  • From "Challenge to Apollo" by Asif Siddiqi: NIP-16 had originally been built in the late 1950s as a modest station for receiving telemetry from overflying satellites, but its central role in the Soviet space program grew dramatically during the early 1960s. In 1959, when OKB-1 first began developing interplanetary spacecraft to fly to Mars and Venus, Korolev and Keldysh proposed a dedicated site to build a deep space tracking station. The designers had a deadline of just eight months. A special commission quickly selected Yevpatoriya on the shore of the Black Sea. The future facility was named "Object MV" to denote its role in tracking spaceships to Mars and Venus, although it was rumored that the "MV" also stood for Mstislav Vsevolodovich, the first two names of Academician Keldysh. Korolev had initially invited Chief Designer Ryazanskiy of NII-885 to design the radio tracking systems for the facility, but he had declined, believing that it would be impossible to develop antennas capable of tracking signals from a distance of 100 million kilometers. Chief Designer Yevgeniy S. Gubenko of SKB-567 took on the job and proposed that instead of one 100-meter parabolic dish, eight sixteen-meter "bowls", designated ADU-1000, be erected at the site, providing a capability to communicate to distances of 300 million kilometers. Korolev came up with an ingenious idea to mount the dishes using leftover parts from the Soviet Navy. Construction workers dug a huge crater out of the rocky ground, poured in a foundation, took the revolving gun turret of a former seafaring battleship consigned to the junkyard, and placed it on the foundation. Then the open framework of a railroad bridge was placed over the turret. The bridge itself was covered by the solid hull of a scrapped submarine. The eight antennas were fixed to this hull. Eventually, the Object MV station at NIP-16 consisted of three complexes separated by several kilometers: one designed to send commands and the two others to receive incoming information. Each complex had eight antennas with a diameter of sixteen meters and a surface area of 1,000 square meters. The transmission power was rated at 120 kilowatts, and the maximum range was 300 million kilometers. The sensitivity was sufficient to detect a match struck on the surface of the Moon. The facility came online on September 26, 1960, on a provisional standing, and it was fully operational by December 30.
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This article was last modified 13 years ago