On the night of Tuesday, February 26, the train with the “Proton-M” launch vehicle, the head fairing and the upper stage DM-03, was sent from the Khrunichev State Space Research and Production Center to the Baikonur cosmodrome.
The “Proton-M” launch vehicle with the DM-03 upper stage, created at RSC “Energia”, will be used to launch the Russian “Spectr-RG” spacecraft.
All activities, related to the sending to the launch site of the launch vehicle under the “Spectr-RG” program were carried out regularly.
The Space Observatory is an international Russian-German project, aimed at creating an orbital astrophysical observatory, designed to study the Universe in the X-ray wavelength range.
“Spectr-RG”, built in the NPO “Lavochkin” includes two telescopes: eRosita, created by the Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics of the Max Planck Society (Germany), and ART-XC, developed by the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and manufactured by the Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics in Sarov.
The main mission of the “Spectr-RG” is the study of the Universe in the X-ray range of electromagnetic radiation, the creation of a “map” of the visible Universe, on which all fairly large clusters of galaxies will be marked.