Progress Design Engineering Bureau of Samara is working on designing Resource-P #2 and Resource-P #3 Earth remote sensing satellites to form on the orbit a group of such satellites, – Progress Director General Alexander Kirillin reported at the meeting with the enterprise staff.
Resource-P #2 satellite launch is scheduled for 2014, the 3rd Resource satellite will be launched in 2015. The other scientific satellite Photon-M being at the final stage of construction now is to be launched in May 2014. In general Progress Bureau plans to perform 22 launches in 2014.
Kirilin reminded that Progress provided for 16 launches in 2013, 11 of them from Baikonur spaceport, 3 – from Plesetsk and 2 – from Guiana space centre. “All launches were successful, payloads were successfully orbited. The most unusual of all was the “Olympic” launch of Soyuz-FG booster with Soyuz TMA-11M spacecraft. Samara rocket was decorated with Olympic ornament for the forst time, – the head of the enterprise noted.
Last year the enterprise specialists launched 5 space devices developed and designed by them: Resource-P earth remote sensing satellite, Bion-M biomedical satellite and 2 Aist small space devices.
According to Kirilin the first Resource-P is in nominal operation now and works on the orbit. The device made about 6,6 million square kilometers of territory shots and this shows that such information is in great demand.
Unique biomedical Bion-M satellite launched in April 2013 operated on the obrit for 30 days and successfully finished its mission in May. Satellite’s scientific program was made up of more than 70 experiments of scientists from Russia, Ukraine, USA, France, Italy, Germany, Republic of Korea etc.
