Gallery The Past, the Present and the Future of Cosmonautics

The mosaic pictures in the underpass at the intersection of Kirovsky Avenue and Bolshaya Sadovaya Street focus on outer space exploration. They portray cosmonauts standing on Ganymede, a satellite of Jupiter. During the preparation work, with a star chart in his hands, Y. N Labintsev, together with astronomers, found out how constellations would look like from there to accurately reproduce the views. Ganymede is the largest satellite in the Solar System, much larger than Mercury and slightly smaller than Mars. Ganymede is 2.02 times heavier than the Moon. Galileo Galilei discovered Ganymede in 1610 using his telescope, the first one in history. Ganymede from Classical Greek means “a merry spirit, thrilling the soul”. According to Greek myths, a beautiful adolescent, a son of Tros, who was a king of Troy, was abducted by Jupiter, who had turned into an eagle, and on the eagle’s back, the youth set about to the heavens, up to Mount Olymp. He became a cupbearer for the gods at feasts. Immortality and eternal youth were given to him. The myth on Ganymede was one of the most popular themes in the arts of Ancient Greece and Rome. The first space ship to study Ganymede was Pioneer 10. During the study in 1973, an underground ocean of salt water was found, and, perhaps, life exists on Ganymede.

On the opposite wall, there is the first spacewalk of a Soviet cosmonaut Aleksey Leonov from Voskhod-2 space ship.

In the other part of the underpass, there is a picture on how the Universe was visioned in ancient times. And this picture is very unusual – on the one hand, we see the earth realm – that is the sun, the sky, a landscape, a curious person – it is made of tiles, and elements of smalto were used for the celestial sphere.

As you leave the underpass for Pokrovsky Park, you see a mosaic map of the Rostov region.