ESA GNC Conference Papers Repository

JSC “NPP “Geofizika-Cosmos”, Moscow, Russia is an enterprise, which unchangeably kept in its partly varying names key word GEOFIZIKA. This enterprise has more than one hundred and fifty years of experience in optical instrument-making, and already a half of century participates in work of national space industry. Different electro-optical devices were created at the enterprise for a huge variety of space vehicles beginning from the first in the world national spacecraft “ZENIT” developed by the outstanding Russian space designer Sergey Korolev to the first module “ZARYA” of the International Space Station, shown in Fig. 1. For example, thirty devices of Geofizika successfully operated on the board of the last national orbital space station “MIR”. All the mentioned space vehicles (SV) had on the board the Earth IR Horizon Sensors (IR HS). The given paper is devoted just to IR HS because Geofizika is the only enterprise in Russia, and may be through out the world, which permanently and continuously during a half of century develops and produces IR HS for control systems of SV in orbit of the Earth satellite. Last time a certain tendency of “intellectualizing” SV control systems is quite obvious. For example, four reports [1 – 4] were devoted to this topic in session “Control Systems of Space Vehicles and Complexes” at XXXII Scientific Conference on Cosmonautics (regular meetings in memory of academician S.P. Korolev and other outstanding national scientists-pioneers of space exploration) in January 2008, Moscow. In its turn it’s quite topical to review evolution of intellectual properties or “smart” features of IR HS developed by Geofizika for such systems. As much as, according to a Russian proverb, every joke has its particle of truth, it is pertinent to compare development of facilities and methods of processing information in the devices with genesis of organism, nervous system and brain of creatures alive noticing, as a joke, fanny resemblance or even similarity of the stages and situations in development of such creatures.