posted February 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 mean time, 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 tweeked 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 3-d, photorealist 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 February 26, 2009 08:05 AM               

Really is a thing a beauty and probably the first time opened in 50 years. It always amazes me how complex technology also is innately artistic.

posted February 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.

posted March 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 April 16, 2009 02:58 AM               

I designed this assembly to exhibit this instrument with its cover opened. It belongs, ideally, onto a walk-around pedestal, under a plexiglass cube.

It also serves as a bench for close-up examination. This sturdy handling assembly can safely be positioned on a tabletop on each of its six faces.

The cover is affixed to the assembly under the instrument proper. (I couldn't put the cover away because a cable bundle goes through it which couldn't be removed non-destructively). I made a special holder for the 19-prong connector.

The slight tilt backwards gives a better viewing angle on both its faceplate and its insides.

I still have a few hours' work to make a crate, then it ships to this exhibition, which opens next Wednesday.

posted April 22, 2009 01:08 PM               

Location

posted November 01, 2009 11:55 PM               

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

posted February 25, 2011 12:31 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by Philip - (almost two years ago!):
Well done François, what the total weight of this piece?

---

I would estimate the net weight to be in the neigbouring of five kilograms.

The front plate is very sturdy -- it serves as a structural support for the entire mechanism. I though originally that it was made of steel, but magnets don't stick to it, so probably aluminum. The encasing cover is also aluminum. It's 5 mm thick with even thicker protuberances.

posted April 07, 2011 01:48 AM               

"Gagarin and the Globus"
Meet witnesses from the Yuri Gagarin era
at the Cosmodôme, this Sunday April 10th, 2011.

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) www.cosmodome.org

posted April 07, 2011 06:09 PM               

There will be Russian food and traditions, and let's hope, some good vodka!

The Globus is now a new exhibit sitting right among Cosmodôme's own large-size Soviet and Russian replicas, right next to a eight-some-feet high Semiorka. Here is Globus exhibit, along with a Soyuz or Almaz clock:

Truth being said, they temporarily had to remove the "V2" exhibit. The Germans will have to wait a few months...

posted April 07, 2011 09:45 PM               

The place is three miles from home, for Pete's sake! A nice bike ride it is in fact, first in Montreal ala Boston, along the banks of the quiet Prairie river, over a low-riding bridge, then Laval and its fresh industrial campuses! You'd see some rowing team at dusk you'd swear you were in Cambridge, MA. Not bad a bike ride for visiting my chargees. Seeing historical stuff serving its purpose is cool.

And I'll see Sylvain more often, I guess... Oh by the way, fellows: Isn't this a cliché for museum directors: he earnestly collects... but he's far from, let's say, savvy.

Las! he's known of my collectSPACE membership for years, but he hardly visits. Busy-busy, aren't we? But man oh man, let's buy!

Friends, he likes autographs, which I know nothing about, so I hope one of you has the little elbow push it takes to usher in this fantastic lad and to make him use it. I'd like him to know the good stuff!!!

posted October 16, 2011 10:57 PM               

Fig. 1 — Here's my unit's electrical connector.

Fig. 2 — Male connector layout

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. As seen in Fig. 2, 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!

Fig. 3 — 'A' is a variable resistor which cycles around once every mechanical 'orbit'.

• 'B' point to two coaxial, cardioid-shaped cam discs.
  
• 'C' is a rocker arm tracing the inner cam disc.
  
• 'E' is a rectifier bridge (I think it feeds the motor)

• 'A' is a conical cam cylinder whose cross-section defines a sinusoidal function.
  
• 'B' is one of three rocker arms tracing the shape of the conical cam.
  
• 'C' is connected to a front-plate knob used by the pilot to set of one of the three orbital parameters. Upon actuation of the knob, the rocker arm moves from one end of the cam to the other, hence modulating the amplitude of the function traced by the rocker arm.
  
• 'D' is the tip of a second rocker arm, tracing the cam 120 degrees apart from the first rocker arm. An unseen third rocker arm traces the cam another 120 degrees further.

posted October 16, 2011 11:01 PM               

• 'B's are rocker arms (two others are hidden from view).
  
• 'C' transmits a resulting motion towards the latitude indicator.

posted October 16, 2011 11:14 PM               

The three 'B's transmit the pilot's manual settings for each of three orbital parameters to the worm drives 'C' shown on Fig. 4.

posted October 20, 2011 02:48 AM               

1. Baykonur
   
2. Kolpashevo
   
3. Yelizovo
   
4. Simferpol, on the Black Sea
   
5. Sholkovo (Moscow)
   
6. Ulan Ude
   
7. Ussurisk
   
8. Krasnoe Selo (Leningrad)
   
9. The blank stickers are fleet ships.