Osservatoria “Spektr-RG” completed the phase in a neighborhood of the point L2

Specialists of Scientific production Association named after S. A. Lavochkin (part of state Corporation “Roscosmos”) on 21 October 2019 carried a correction of the transition to the nominal trajectory of the spacecraft “Spektr-RG”, which means the end of this phase of the flight apparatus in the neighborhood of the libration point L2 of the system “Sun — Earth”.

After completion of the preparatory work for setting up the x-ray telescope ART-XC and eROSITA Observatory will begin to fulfill the main scientific program. Monitoring will be carried out within six and a half years, of which 4 years in scanning mode, starry sky, and 2.5 years — in the mode of point observations of objects in the Universe. During the 100-day mission of “Spektr-RG” was made two corrections, which made getting into orbit in the vicinity of the outer Lagrange point L2 of the system “Sun — Earth”.

Libration point is a special point in the system “Sun — Earth”. At these points the gravitational field of the Earth and the Sun acting on the small body, balanced. However, this is a point of unstable equilibrium, and so in order to be in the neighbourhood of this point the unit will follow the evolution of the halo-orbit in a few hundred thousand kilometers around the libration point. To date, both telescopes on-Board the Observatory: eROSITA (Germany) and ART-XC (Russia) successfully passed the stage of testing and monitoring in the framework of the calibration and early science program.

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Spacecraft “Spektr-RG” was launched exactly 100 days ago, on 13 July 2019 from the Baikonur cosmodrome. It was created with the participation of Germany in the framework of the Federal space program of Russia by order of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Observatory is equipped with two unique x-ray mirror telescopes: ART-XC (IKI, Russia) and eROSITA (MPE, Germany), working on the principle of x-ray optics oblique incidence. The telescopes mounted on the space platform “Navigator” (NPO Lavochkin, Russia) adapted to the objectives of the project.

• Scientific head of mission: academician Rashid Alievich Sunyaev; scientific supervisor for the telescope ART-XC (Russia): doctor of Phys.-math. Sciences Michael Pavlinsky; scientific adviser to telescope eROSITA (Germany): Dr. Peter Limits!
• The main goal of the mission — mapping the entire sky in soft (0.3-8 Kev) and hard (4-20 Kev) x-ray ranges of the spectrum with unprecedented sensitivity.

It is expected that the review of the sky “Spektr-RG” will detect about 3 million accretively supermassive black holes, 100,000 galaxy clusters, hundreds of thousands of stars with active crowns and accretively white dwarfs, zvezdoobrazovaniya tens of thousands of galaxies and many other objects, including those of unknown nature. These data are crucial for understanding how distributed matter in the Universe, what role in its development played dark energy and how it appeared and was growing supermassive black holes.

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