Russia’s space telescope in orbit
Spektr-R begins five-year mission
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Russia is celebrating its return to heavy-hitter status in space, with the successful launch of the Spektr-R radio telescope from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday.
The radio telescope, which has now successfully reached orbit, is Russia’s answer to the Hubble Space Telescope, but with an added twist: its ability to link with ground-based radio telescopes in the international Radioastron project will give it an effective collection radius of 30 times Earth’s diameter, allowing it to view objects at 10,000 times Hubble’s resolution.
By Earth-bound telescope standards, the dish launched into space is tiny: a 10-meter instrument that will follow an elliptical orbit at an apogee of 340,000 km and dip to a wave-skimming perigee of just 1,000km.
Proposed and delayed since the 1980s, the launch of Spektr-R on its five-year mission comes as America says farewell to its Space Shuttle programme.
Although Russian-led, Spektr-R involves scientists from 20 nations, either through providing on-board hardware or through co-operation from terrestrial antennas.
According to Russia’s Federal Space Agency, the Radioastron programme will “obtain images, coordinates, motions and evolution of angular structure of different radio emitting objects”, including pulsars, interstellar plasma, black holes, and neutron stars. ®
COMMENTS
Good for them!
Science is kind of like breathing. If you stop doing it, you die. If a society today stops doing science, research into fundamental processes and expansion of basic knowledge, the society will die. IE, the conservatives in our government are killing us...
The Russians are coming
back to space.
I only found out about this from the Russian Television channel - RT.
The Americans have been silent about it, but that is to be expected.
Nothing worth anything ever happens outside of America.
Two types of "ancient societies"
- The ones that used science and became modern societies
- The ones that "had no need for science" and either died out from stagnation or were absorbed into science-using societies.
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