MOSCOW, Dec. 20 (UPI) -- This year, Russia has continued to receive data from the Mars-Express and Venus-Express interplanetary probes, which make use of equipment made with active participation of Russian experts.
The Mars probe discovered water on the planet in the form of subsurface ice, findings which imply that water flowed on the Martian surface until only five years ago.
The Venus-Express has found out that the deuterium-hydrogen ratio in the planet's upper atmosphere is 150 times higher than that in the Earth's atmosphere. It can therefore be assumed that all water has vanished from the surface of Venus.
Four Spektr-class astrophysical orbital observatories will lift off under the 2006-2015 federal space program. The first such observatory, the Spektr-Radioastron, was supposed to go into orbit this year, but the launch has been rescheduled for late 2008. These delays can be explained by the fully-fledged crisis that plagued the Russian space program throughout the 1990s, whose consequences have not yet been completely overcome.
All astrophysical projects in the Spektr series were conceived during the Soviet era and meant to conduct research in the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Had this program been implemented in the 1990s as planned, then Russian science would now be a world leader.
Radioastron and the Spektr-RG, both of which could have lifted off in the mid-1990s, required heavy and expensive Proton launch vehicles. Russia's new economic situation, however, meant that it had to spend more time developing lighter space platforms that could be launched on cheaper Soyuz rockets.
There is now every reason to believe that the Spektr - Radioastron observatory will lift off in 2008 and operate in conjunction with a global ground instrument network. Known as radio interferometers, these combined systems have an impressive resolving power comparable to that of a radio telescope whose antenna diameter is equal to the distance between the system's ground and space instruments.
The Radioastron will orbit at a distance of 210,000 miles, so the radio interferometer's resolving power will therefore total a hundred-thousandth of an arc second, enabling it to observe even the smallest radio sources in the Universe.
The Spektr-UF observatory with an ultraviolet telescope will lift off in 2009-2010. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, worth $6 billion, is now the largest and most expensive ultraviolet observation system ever. However, 50 percent of the telescope's observation time is lost due to its near-Earth orbit.
The Russian telescope will either be inserted into a highly elongated orbit with an apogee of 180,000 miles or into the so-called libration point about 900,000 miles from the Earth and 89.1 million miles from the Sun. Consequently, Earth-Moon influence, which hinders observations, will be minimized.
The Russian telescope is unique because Hubble will probably stop operating in the next two years, and the United States has no plans for launching the Space Ultraviolet Observatory before 2020. Other countries do not intend to orbit any large ultraviolet telescopes either. Russia's ultraviolet project is therefore a godsend for the global astronomy community because it will help eliminate numerous blank spots over the next decade.
This is good news for the Spektr-RG project, which was conceived in the early 1990s. The Russian Space Agency and the European Space Agency have decided to coordinate their X-ray and gamma-ray research under the joint Spektr-RG/eROSITA/Lobster program.
If successful, this program would make it possible to scan the entire sky by X-ray imaging telescopes in a broad energy band. The observatory is scheduled to lift off in 2011.
--
(Yury Zaitsev is an expert with the Space Research Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences. This article is published by permission of the RIA Novosti news agency.)
--
(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited
