It was a one and only popular science magazine in Soviet Union, it was mainly
oriented to young people but all Russian people of all ages enjoyed reading it.
Categories Photos, Science, Society, Technology
Anton Chekalin has visited Russian Antarctic station and has shot there some interesting places. For example, what you see on the photo above is the Russian water well. The have made a 16 feet (5
meters) deep hole in the ice and there they can get fresh water from somewhere, so when person gets in there he can see sun trying to penetrate through this many feet thick ice.
Categories Photos, Science, Society, Technology
Russian army has space vessels and it needs good telescopes to control the fleet. Some like those ones in the
mountains of Tajikistan, previously very secret location, now is sometimes open for the visitors.
Before the satelite communication was implemented Russian military bases located at the low-populated places such as shores of Arctic Ocean or frozen Siberian forests had to communicate somehow. It was practically impossible to connect them with wire because required too much effort, and was not secure at all - just a small cut off of the line would cause days of searching for it at -40 weather. So Russian army has implemented the network of stations that fired their messages to ionosphere then the message was reflected from it and returned to the Earth surface - right to another station. By connecting those stations in relay chain
they could communicate through all 10000 mile wide Russian land instantly. After the sat connections came into play some of the stations were discontinued some were converted to satelite link. Below you can see the map of this system, and the basic stations. People were sent there to serve their military service for two years guided by full time military commanders. Some still remember those times with a nice nostalgic feeling, some don't - just imagine to live in the middle of the nowhere for couple of years with the only task to service some strange looking antenna.
Categories History, Photos, Science, Technology
Russian Northern coast is a vast territory lays for a few thousand of miles and all this coastline is inside the Polar Circle. Long polar winters mean no daylight at all, just one day changes another without any sign of the Sun rising above the horizon. There is only polar night for 100 day a year. But across this Northern coast there was always a short way for the cargo boats to travel from Eastern part of Russia to the Western. Now this trip can be made fairly easy with the appearance of all the satellite navigation equipment like GPS and others, but during the Soviet Era they had none of this. So, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to build a chain of lighthouses to guide ships finding their way in the dark polar night across uninhabited shores of the Soviet Russian Empire. So it has been done and a series of such lighthouses has been erected. They had to be fully autonomous, because they were situated hundreds and hundreds miles aways from any populated areas. After reviewing different ideas on how to make them work for a years without service and any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up those structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses. Those small
reactors could work in the independent mode for years and didn't require any human interference, so it was very handy in the situation like this. It was a kind of robot-lighthouse which counted itself the time of the year and the length of the daylight, turned on its lights when it was needed and sent radio signals to near by ships to warn them on their journey. It all looks like ran out the sci-fi book pages, but so they were. Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses did it job for some time, but after some time they collapsed too. Mostly as a result of the hunt for the metals like copper and other stuff which were performed by the looters. They didn't care or maybe even didn't know the meaning of the "Radioactive Danger" sign and ignored them, breaking in and destroying the equipment. It sounds creepy but they broke into the reactors too causing all the structures to become radioactively polluted. Those photos are from the trip to the one of such structures, the most close to the populated areas of the Russian far east. Now, there are signs "RADIOACTIVITY" written with big white letters on the approaching paths to the structure but they don't stop the abandoned exotics lovers.
Some Russian textbooks for English studies are way to straightforward. This one was pointed to help memorizing some rules like don't use "will"
after "if", or when to say "sorry" and when "excuse me" and some others - you can easily guess which pictures is for which rule.
This Russian guy is fond of making photos of the 'slime
molds' - micro mushrooms that grow on the plants.
Categories History, Photos, Science, Technology
For those, who wondered "Where did all the three Russian shuttles
go?". One has been found on the backyard of some repairing shop.
Categories History, Photos, Science, Technology
While browsing the post about the aerial views of Russia some spotted the
"Golden Eye" alike radar structure. Let's have a closer look.
Categories Photos, Science, Technology, Video
On the video you can see a Russian jet fighter implementing thrust vectoring technology. The pilot explains in English its advantages. In general this is a technology that uses jet engines which can rotate their nozzles in any direction and also change the size of the nozzle for precise thrust control which gives
unbelievable maneuver ability. And below you can see the shots from the plant in Russian Siberia where they build those engines. They call it "the only plant in the world with serial mass production of thrust vectoring jet engines" and that NATO countries buy those engines to equip their planes.
