Space Museum

The Space Museum was ceremoniously opened on June 27, 2001 in Garni, in the territory of the Institute of Space Astronomy. In the Garni center, under the leadership of Professor Grigor Gurzadyan, the ORION space observatories were created,  about 40 cosmonauts underwent their pre-flight training.

The museum’s exposition includes unique exhibits created in Armenia during the early era of space exploration in 1960-1980s. Here one can see the original space capsule (1962), returned from outer space, with its coverage burnt upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere, other exhibits that have also been in outer space. Among the exhibits is the duplicate of the ORION-1 space observatory, installed on the first space station SALYUT-1 (1971). Cosmonaut Viktor Patsayev, who conducted observations with the help of ORION-1, is considered “the first astronomer in the world to work outside the Earth’s atmosphere.”

A duplicate of the ORION-2 space observatory, launched on the Soyuz-13 spacecraft (1973), is on display. Its parameters surpassed similar devices of its time; the scientific results were published in NATURE and other world journals. This item was exhibited at EXPO-2000 in Hannover.

The museum displays various historical documents of space flights, handwritten materials of cosmonauts, renown scientists, designers of the VOSTOK and SOYUZ spacecraft, astronauts and designers of American spacecraft. Among the significant documents is the manuscript of an article by Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, one of the key figures in the creation of the first nuclear bombs; the article was co-authored with Grigor Gurzadyan.

The museum includes materials on the current participation of researchers of Alikhanian National Laboratory, Yerevan, in European Space Agency satellite programs on testing of General Relativity and fundamental physics, as well as on testing of Lorentz invariance in European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, Grenoble. The obtained results had entered encyclopedias.