Russia launches a telescope in space to map the cosmos with an "exceptional" detail

Russia has successfully launched a new telescope in space, marking an important milestone for its space science program and potentially opening the door to mapping the cosmos to a level of detail never before achieved.

The Spektr-RG telescope, a Russian-German joint venture, was successfully delivered into orbit by a Russian Proton-M rocket, the Associated Press reported. The rocket was launched Saturday night, local time, after the repeated delay of the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The telescope is en route to its final destination, the L2 Lagrange point, which the craft is expected to reach in about three months.

"Lagrange points are unique positions in the solar system where objects can maintain their position relative to the sun and planets in orbit," AP said.

The L2, located about a million kilometers from the Earth, is a "parking place" popular observatories because it offers an unobstructed view of the great outdoors. Once there, the objective of the telescope will be to carry out a complete study of the sky by X-rays, an analysis "with an exceptional sensitivity", according to Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.

It would be the world's first high-energy X-ray map, Nature magazine said.

Such a map "will be essential to solving the fundamental issues of modern cosmology," Roscosmos said in a press release. "How does black energy and dark matter affect the formation of the large-scale structure of the universe? What is [the] cosmological evolution of supermassive black holes?

The agency added that the telescope, which would have taken decades to develop, is expected to detect about "100,000 massive clusters of galaxies" and millions of supermassive black holes – many of which are new to science – over the years. 39, a four-year investigation period.

If Spektr-RG reaches L2, it will be the first Russian spacecraft to come out of Earth's orbit since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As AP noted, the The success of the mission would be a considerable asset to the Russian space program, which has suffered from decades of budget cuts and failed projects.

This mission would put Russia "at the forefront of X-ray astronomy," said Kirpal Nandra of the German Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, one of Moscow's collaborators on the Spektr-RG project.

"This is a huge opportunity for them," Nandra told the BBC this week.