Russia Fills USA Space Gap: Launches Most Advanced Space Radio Telescope Ever Built

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A new Russian space telescope, Spectrum-R, has "reached the targeted orbit," as of Monday morning, the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced in an English-language statement on its website. Russia is eager to show its resurgence in space exploration, particularly as NASA shuts down its shuttle program.
The new observatory, known as Spectrum-R, is designed to study sources of radio waves from stellar phenomena, including pulsars, quasars, black holes, and neutron stars. The agency added that the space telescope will have a minimum lifetime of "no less than five years."

"We will be able to observe very remote parts of the universe and to receive a highly accurate data about various galactic phenomena," said Viktor Khartov, the chief of the Lavochkin Research and Production Association, in an interview with the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS.
The space telescope was initially conceived of decades ago, during the early days of the Soviet space program, but was perpetually postponed, and was mothballed after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

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