Russia has victoriously launched a new powerful X-Ray telescope in space, thus marking a key milestone for the nation’s space science initiative.
The telescope called Spektr-RG was delivered successfully into orbit by Proton-M rocket, reported the Associated Press. After repeated delays, the rocket was finally launched on Saturday from the Cosmodrome located in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
According to Russian space company Rocsosmos, the Spektr-RG telescope would offer fresh new insights on changing behaviour of the cosmic expansion. This would allow the researchers to trace the universe’s huge structure in an unprecedented way.
The Spektr-RG telescope is moving towards a famous parking space called L2 Lagrange point, which is located around one million miles away from Earth, and is expected to arrive there in roughly 3 months.
L2 are the perfect positions where the objects can maintain their spot relative to the Sun as well as the planets which orbit it. Once it arrives there, the major goal of the telescope would be to carry out X-Ray mapping of the entire sky. This would be the first mapping conducted on the universe using high-power X-Rays, noted the Nature magazine.
Notably, the German-developed Spektr-RG telescope is a replacement of the telescope Spektr-R on which Russia lost control in the month of January. As such, if the Spectr-RG gets to L2 as planned, it would be the first ever Russian space shuttle to go beyond the orbit of Earth since Soviet Union collapse.