Kosmos 320 ( meaning ''Cosmos 320''), also known as DS-MO No.3 was a technology demonstration

satellite A satellite or an artificial satellite is an object, typically a spacecraft, placed into orbit around a celestial body. They have a variety of uses, including communication relay, weather forecasting, navigation ( GPS), broadcasting, scient ...

which was launched by the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

in 1970 as part of the Dnepropetrovsk Sputnik programme. Its primary mission was to demonstrate orientation control by means of an aerodynamic skirt stabiliser. It also carried an optical research payload for the

Soviet Armed Forces The Armed Forces of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, also known as the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union, the Red Army (1918–1946) and the Soviet Army (1946–1991), were the armed forces of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republi ...

Launch

It was launched aboard a

Kosmos-2I The Kosmos (also spelled Cosmos, Russian: ) rockets were a series of Soviet and subsequently Russian rockets, derived from the R-12 and R-14 missiles, the best known of which is the Kosmos-3M, which has made over 440 launches. The Kosmos fami ...

63SM rocket from Site 86/4 at

Kapustin Yar Kapustin Yar () is a Russian military training area and a rocket launch complex in Astrakhan Oblast, about 100 km east of Volgograd. It was established by the Soviet Union on 13 May 1946. In the beginning, Kapustin Yar used technology, material ...

. The launch occurred at 10:59:58 UTC on 16 January 1970.

Orbit

Kosmos 320 was placed into a

low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an geocentric orbit, orbit around Earth with a orbital period, period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an orbital eccentricity, eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial object ...

with a perigee of , an apogee of , 48.4 degrees of inclination, and an orbital period of 90.2 minutes. It decayed from orbit on 10 February 1970. Kosmos 320 was the second of two DS-MO satellites to be launched. It was preceded by Kosmos 149, which was launched in March 1967.

References

Kosmos satellites Spacecraft launched in 1970 1970 in the Soviet Union Dnepropetrovsk Sputnik program {{USSR-spacecraft-stub