This Saturday, Russia launched Spektr-RG. Its latest space telescope that the country developed with the help of Germany. It was sent to replace the Russian Hubble, the Spektr-R as according to the officials, Spektr-R wasn’t working anymore since January. Spektr-R was first launched back in 2011 and its main purpose was to look at the black holes and neutron stars. The Spektr-RG is supposed to be performing similar tasks while expanding it to X-ray the complete sky. This can help give knowledge about all the large scale structure of Universe.
The accelerating behaviour of our cosmic expansion is the latest scope the Spektr-RG is expected to catch, the Russia needs new insights on the cosmic behaviour and the newly discovered three million black holes of massive sides that are located at the center of the galaxies. These are X-ray sources are generated when gas falls inside the black hole and the matter gets heat up and shreds to produce these.
The launch of Spektr-RG was delayed a couple of times before the final launch on Saturday as some battery issues postponed the scheduled June 21st launch date. There is a video posted on Roskosmos official website showing the rocket called Proton-M carry Spektr-RG before launching from Baikonur. It was a great pride for the whole country when the launch finally occurred as there has been many setbacks to the space program projects in last few years.
Furthermore, Italian and US astronauts will be travelling with Russian cosmonaut scheduled this 20th July to ISS.
Source: State Space Corporation ROSCOSMOS http://en.roscosmos.ru/
