Russia… A Bigger Look (Satellite)

[SatNews] Roskosmos has unfurled one super-sized antenna in space…



A giant new Russian space telescope on Saturday unfurled its dish-like antenna which will observe radio waves from galaxies and black holes billions of light years away. The operation to deploy the 10-meter-diameter antenna of the Spketr-R telescope, which was launched into orbit last Monday, was successfully carried out — “According to telemetry data, the planned program was carried out in full,” Roskosmos said.



The Interfax news agency said scientists at the Lavochkin institute outside Moscow had begun last Friday the tricky operation of opening up the plates of the dish-like petals. The radio space telescope’s launch was a major event in the Russian space program, marking its first deep space project in years and heralding a return to cosmic exploration. Dubbed the Russian Hubble after the iconic U.S. space telescope, the Russian instrument will produce images with a resolution many thousand times greater than Hubble’s captures.



The telescope will look at quasars, high-energy galactic centers in the distant universe, fast-spinning pulsar star remnants and also massive black holes. It will have a minimum working life of at least five years. In November, Russia is due to launch its Fobos-Grunt probe, which will seek to return a soil sample from the Martian moon Phobos to Earth — the probe will also observe the Red Planet. 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 few years. With the end of the U.S. space shuttle program, it has now become the sole nation capable of transporting humans to the International Space Station (ISS).