A Zenit 3F rocket carrying the Spektr-R radio astronomy observatory blasts off from the Russian leased Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome.
Credit: AFP
MOSCOW: Russia has launched its Spektr-R radio telescope into space, planned to be the most powerful ever and the first deep space observatory sent up by Moscow in a quarter of a century.
Spektr-R will scour the fringes of the universe for black holes, mysterious quasar radio sources and also the fast rotating stellar remnants known as pulsars, Russian space agency Roskosmos said.
The instrument, dubbed the 'Russian Hubble' after the iconic US space telescope but many thousands of times more powerful, will give astronomers new opportunities for looking billions of light years back in time to the young universe and unlocking the mysteries of black holes.
Finding extra-galactic phenomena
"It will allow us to look into the furthest reaches of the universe with a very sharp resolution and receive data about extra-galactic phenomena," said the project's constructor Viktor Khartov of the Lavochkin institute outside Moscow. "The whole world is waiting for this," he added.
The observatory, a project first conceived three decades ago under the Soviet Union, successfully blasted off from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Zenit rocket, Roskosmos said.
It will have a highly elliptical orbit of around 340,000 km, and an official working life of five years, although its creators hope it may last even longer.
Resolution 100,000 times better
The far-Earth orbit will bring it within 50,000 km of the moon, allowing it to use the lunar gravity to change the orbit angle and see more of the sky.
Boasting a 10-metre diameter antenna that will unfurl from carbon-fibre petals, Spektr-R's creators say that it will be able to produce images with a resolution 100,000 times that of the famed U.S. Hubble Space telescope.
The first images from the telescope are expected to be released by the end of the year. According to the project's website, the aim of the observatory is to examine objects like supermassive black holes and young stars "with an unprecedented high angular resolution in the centimetre and decimetre wavelength bands."
Creating a virtual database
Working with ground based telescopes, Spektr-R will be able to create a virtual base for receiving data 340,000-kilometres long by using a technique known as inferomety which combines signals from different sources.
The telescope, which official Russian news agencies said is the first such launched by Moscow for 25 years, comes as Russia is seriously returning to deep space exploration after years of absence. It is due in November to finally launch its eagerly-awaited Fobos-Grunt probe, which will seek to return a soil sample from the Martian moon Fobos to Earth and also observe the Red Planet.
"The main point is that Russia is returning to scientific programmes in space after a long break," Roskosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin said after the launch, quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency.
Celebrating the 50th anniversary year of Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight, Russia is hoping to show it remains a global power in space science despite a string of setbacks over the last years. With the end of the U.S. space shuttle programme, it has now become the sole nation capable of transporting humans to the International Space Station (ISS).
Martian moon
Good on the Russians.
Phobos with an'F'! Is that to be the regular name now?