Russian Scientist Charged With Treason Specialized In Protecting Earth From Asteroids

Sergei Meshcheryakov, a scientist from Russian rocket and spacecraft scientific center TsNIIMash, who has been detained and charged with treason, frequently published articles in foreign scientific journals about how to project the Earth from space debris and asteroids, according to a list of his work in the electronic scientific depository Elibrary

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 16th July, 2019) Sergei Meshcheryakov, a scientist from Russian rocket and spacecraft scientific center TsNIIMash, who has been detained and charged with treason, frequently published articles in foreign scientific journals about how to project the Earth from space debris and asteroids, according to a list of his work in the electronic scientific depository Elibrary.

On Monday, it was reported that Meshcheryakov had been placed under house arrest in connection with a treason case against him. He became the third TsNIIMash employee to be charged with treason in the past year after Viktor Kudryavtsev and his student Roman Kovalev. According to Kudryavtsev, investigators believe that he and Kovalev were involved in sending secret data to The von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, a NATO research center in Belgium, with which TsNIIMash conducted a joint project.

In a conversation with Sputnik, one of Meshcheryakov's colleagues in TsNIImash described the 77-year-old scientist as a "passive" person who "could hardly react to the world around him, being immersed in himself."

Meshcheryakov's work has been published in journals of the European Space Agency and International Astronautical Congresses. The scientist has studied various ways of protecting the Earth and satellites from external danger, such as deflecting a dangerous space object with an explosion or via impact.

In 2015, he and his colleagues published an article on the subject titled "The Concept and Possible Scenario of a Demonstration Flight to the Potentially Dangerous 2001 JV1 Asteroid with the Aim of Changing its Orbit by an Artificial Explosion."

In April, at a scientific conference on space debris, Meshcheryakov announced that the cloud of potassium-sodium droplets, which come from the alloy that was used as a coolant, being ejected from the nuclear reactors of Soviet satellites posed a high risk to spacecraft operating at an altitude of about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles).

Meshcheryakov was a member of a large international scientific project called NEOShield (Near Earth Objects Shield), which is coordinated by the German Aerospace Center. The project involves organizations from Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, the United States and Russia. As part of the project from 2012-2015, Russian scientists developed a system for countering Earth-threatening asteroids using nuclear explosions in space.

The exact charges against Meshcheryakov have not been announced since the information is currently regarded as privileged.