Ten (+1) not so well-known facts from IKI history

Even though the esthetical value of IKI’s building is arguable, it is worth knowing its architect — Yuri Pavlovich Platonov. Moscow people know him for the complex of buildings — new Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences near Gagarin Square and for Europe Square ensemble near Kievsky railway station. By the way, not only IKI occupies the building in Profsoyuznaya Str. Together with it, Institute for Earthquake Prediction Theory and Mathematical Geophysics, the Center for Forest Ecology and Productivity, and part of Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics are located there. All of them are also organizations of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Although it is difficult to name the “first” project of IKI, it may well be Cosmos-261. A tragicomic story goes with it. On one (very unhappy) day, the basement of the ordinary house in Nizhnyaya Maslovka street was flooded. Water damaged scientific instruments, which were prepared for Сosmos-261 spacecraft by the staff of the IKI’s laboratory led by Yuri Galperin (see fact No 2). Despite this, the people managed to build them anew, and the satellite was successfully launched on December 19, 1968. 

The core of the scientific program in IKI’s first years were missions to Mars and Venus, to be launched in the 1970s. The first large project, Mars-69, unfortunately, was not implemented because of the launchers’ failures. The first successes came with missions Mars-2 and -3 (1971), Mars-5 (1973) and Venera-9 and -10 (1975), which were in many respects the world ‘firsts’. 

In 1967, IKI’s facilities were reinforced with the State Design and Technology Bureau of Instrument Engineering with an experimental plant in the city of Frunze (now Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan). This new department, or branch, was named the Specified Design Bureau (Russian acronym OKB) of IKI. This bureau did not have its own premises at first. It received the area and the building of a metal bed factory.

The first flight models of scientific instruments developed and built at OKB IKI in 1967–69 were installed on board Prognoz-1, -2  and -3 satellites (from the first to the third). The instruments studied solar activity and its impact on the interplanetary medium and the Earth's magnetosphere. After the collapse of the Soviet Union OKB found itself in the foreign country. In 1993, it changed its name to Aalam Design Bureau (later a joint-stock company), cooperated with the IKI for some time, then it gradually ceased scientific and space work.

After the success of VEGA project in 1986, whose aim was to explore Venus and Halley's Comet, IKI was awarded the Order of Lenin. It was presented by the first secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the USSR Communist Party Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin, the future first president of the Russian Federation. Also in 1986, Pope John Paul II showed interest in this topic. He invited members of the Inter-Agency Consultative Group (IACG) to a special audience. IACG included the heads of space missions, which had performed Halley’s Comet fly-bys. Among them were Academician Roald Sagdeev, head of VEGA project, then director of IKI, and his colleagues from the Institute. The Catholic Church's interest in the project was partly due to the fact that Halley's Comet was depicted as the Star of Bethlehem in one of Giotto's frescoes — for some time there was an assumption that Halley's Comet was the very star that indicated to the Magi the place of Christ's birth. The theory has not been confirmed later, but the connection between the artist's name, Christianity and space exploration led to the appearance of such a photograph.