As first Soviet system of remote sensing of land “Ocean-O” saved ships from ice captivity

“Ocean-o” in the 80s of the twentieth century became the world’s first operational radar space system of remote sensing of the Earth (DZZ). One of its priority tasks was to study the ice situation in the areas of the Arctic and Antarctic, as well as monitoring the water surface of the world ocean, which indicates the name of the system. The brightest page in the history of this Soviet development was the conclusion from the heavy ice of the Antarctica of the Scientific Expeditionary Ship “Mikhail Somov” in 1985. Ocean-O served as a starting point for the development of Russian monitoring technologies from space.

Birth of Ocean

Ocean-O system began to form with the conclusion in the orbit of Space-1076 satellites, “space-1151”, “Intercosmos-20” and “Intercosmos-21” for use in scientific and methodological studies. In 1979-1985, experiments were carried out on the sounding of the ocean and the atmosphere with the help of traily microwave radiometers. We were tested by all-weather techniques for the global scale of water surface temperature, driving wind speed, water vapor content in an atmosphere, cloud water and ice field boundaries.

album “Ocean-O Space System

An important role in the success of the scientific experimentation program and the work of the Ocean-O “as a whole was played by the equipment developed and manufactured by the Research Institute of Instrument Engineering, its successor – the Russian Research Institute of Space Instrument Engineering (today – Russian Space Systems of the State Corporation Roskosmos “), as well as the Special Design Bureau of MEI (OKB MEI, the company Holding RCC) – onboard storage device and multichannel scanning microwave (microwave) Radiometer” Delta-2D “.

The devices provided a parallel four-channel entry on the magnetic tape of the entire amount of information from the scanner of the small resolution of MSU and onboard radar. Professionals proposed a mode of mutual data synchronization, which allowed for the first time in world practice to ensure the transfer of combined optical and radio information.

/Media reports.