Yantar (satellite)

Yantar, the Russian word for amber, was a series of Russian, earlier Soviet, reconnaissance satellites that supplemented and then replaced the Zenit spacecraft. The programme began in 1964, when the design bureau OKB-1 was told to improve on the Zenit-2 satellites, and the high resolution Yantar-2K won government support with a first flight originally planned for 1970, although the date slipped. Yantar-2K stayed in orbit for a month, against the eight to fourteen days of a Zenit, and carried two film return capsules; the Yantar-4K1 that followed had a better camera and stayed up for 45 days. Yantar-Terilen was the first real-time digital system, and the Yantar satellites became the basis of the later Orlets, Resurs and Persona satellites. In all 179 were launched, nine of them lost in launch failures, almost all on the Soyuz-U carrier rocket, and the last was Kosmos 2505, launched on 5 June 2015. Progress Rocket Space Centre lists Yantar among the satellites it produced.