Starship Asterisk*

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00003102/ wrote:

At 0231 UTC on July 18, 2011, the Spektr-R radio observatory launched on a Zenit rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

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Congratulations to Russia on the launch of Spektr-R (RadioAstron)
by Louis Friedman, The Planetary Society | Jul. 18, 2011

<<Good news from Russia today: after 20 years of development they have finally launched their RadioAstron satellite (the official name is Spektr-R) into a high elliptical orbit around Earth. We congratulate the Russian team on this launch and wish them success with the mission. RadioAtron was launched on a Zenit rocket with a Fregat upper stage boosting it to the higher orbit. This Zenit/Fregat combination is the same as the one that will launch the Phobos-Grunt mission later this year. Phobos-Grunt is, of course, the sample return mission on which The Planetary Society's Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE) will fly. We are mighty happy about this launch, since the Russian space establishment considered a successful RadioAstron launch to be a necessary prerequisite to the launch of the Phobos mission.

As the name indicates, RadioAstron will make radio astronomy observations deep into the universe. RadioAstron's large, 10-meter space radio telescope will work as part of a very long baseline interferometery (VLBI) network with ground-based radio telescopes. Its development has been led by Academician Nikolai Kardesheev at the Astro Space Center of the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Science. The spacecraft was built by the Lavochkin Association, part of the Russian space agency.

NASA and other space agencies are cooperating with Russia on RadioAstron, although NASA gave up plans to be a major participant on the project due to the very long delays in its development. Although some of the instrumentation on board is now old, containing pre-1990s technology, scientists still hope to make high angular resolution measurements relevant to cosmological questions of dark energy detection and observations of supermassive black holes and neutron stars.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECTRE wrote:
SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) is a global terrorist organisation featured in the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming, the films based on those novels, and James Bond video games. Led by evil genius and supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the organisation first formally appeared in the novel Thunderball (1961) and in the movie Dr. No (1962). SPECTRE is not aligned to any nation or political ideology, enabling the later Bond books and Bond films to be regarded as apolitical. SPECTRE began in the novels as a small group of criminals but became a vast international organisation with its own SPECTRE Island training base in the films.

In Ian Fleming's novels, SPECTRE is a commercial enterprise led by Blofeld. Their top-level membership comprises 21 individuals, 18 of whom handle day-to-day affairs and are drawn in groups of three from six of the world's greatest criminal organisations—the Gestapo, SMERSH, Marshal Josip Broz Tito's secret police, the Mafia, the Unione Corse, and a massive heroin-smuggling operation based in Turkey. Their debut is in Thunderball. At the time of writing the novel (1959) Fleming believed that the Cold War might end during the two years it would take to produce the film, which would leave it looking dated; he therefore thought it better to create a politically neutral enemy for Bond.[2] The organisation is next mentioned in The Spy Who Loved Me, when Bond describes investigating their activities in Toronto before the story begins.

The organisation's third appearance is in On Her Majesty's Secret Service where Blofeld, hired by an unnamed country or party (though the Soviet Union is implied) is executing a plan to ruin British agriculture. Blofeld, with a weakened SPECTRE would appear for the final time in You Only Live Twice.

Organizational discipline is notoriously draconian with the penalty for disobedience or failure being death. As quoted by Blofeld on several occasions: "This organisation does not tolerate failure". Furthermore, to heighten the impact of the executions, Blofeld often chooses to focus attention on an innocent member, making it appear his death is imminent, only to suddenly strike down the actual target when that person is off guard.

In the novels, the numbers of members were initially assigned at random and then rotated by two digits every month to prevent detection. For example, if one was Number 1 this month, he would be Number 3 next month. At the time of Thunderball, the leader, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, has been assigned "Number 2", while Emilio Largo is assigned "Number 1".

The SPECTRE cabinet had a total of 21 members. Blofeld was the chairman and leader because he founded the organisation, and Largo was elected by the cabinet to be second in command. A physicist named Kotze and an electronics expert named Maslov were also included in the group for their expertise on scientific and technical matters.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioAstron wrote:
RadioAstron (or Spektr R) is a Russian space-borne radio telescope. It is funded by the Russian Astro Space Center, and was launched into Earth orbit on 18 July 2011, with a perigee of 10,000 kilometers and an apogee of 390,000 kilometers (240,000 mi).

The RadioAstron Project is designed by the Astro Space Center of the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Science, and the S.A. Lavochkin Federal Research & Production Association, Roscosmos in cooperation with numerous Russian and international organizations.

Astrophysical space observatory providing results of radio-astrophysical observations of extragalactic objects with ultra-high resolution by radio-interferometrical methods together with a ground-based system of radio-telescopes within wave lengths ranges 1.35 – 6.0; 18.0; 92.0 cm, as well as researching of characteristics of near-Earth and interplanetary plasma. RadioAstron will allow the universe to be observed with an extraordinarily high angular resolution. It is the unique brainchild of Russian scientists. The massive space traveling telescope promises to unveil numerous mysteries of deep space. It has been over a decade in the making. Spektr-R will be the biggest telescope ever launched into space. Together with its largest earth-bound siblings, it will create a network able to provide detailed images of the universe. In space, the flower-like telescope will open its 27 petals within 30 minutes.

At launch the mass of the spacecraft was about 5,000 kilograms. It will be launched by a Zenit-2SB carrier rocket with a Fregat-2CB upper stage. The main scientific goal of the mission is the study of astronomical objects with an angular resolution up to a few millionths of an arcsecond.

Zenith-3M launcher with Fregat-SB upper stage and Russian astrophysical observatory Spectrum-R lifted off from Baikonur’s pad 45 on July 18, at 6.31 a.m. MSK.>>

http://www.tgdaily.com/space-features/57319-russia-launches-biggest-ever-space-telescope wrote: Russia launches 'biggest-ever' space telescope
Posted on Jul 19th 2011 by Emma Woollacott

The Russian RadioAstron space telescope - effectively, the biggest ever - has been successfully launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.

<<While the telescope itself has a nothing-to-write-home-about 10-meter antenna, it will be connected to ground-based telescopes through interferometry to give a far higher effective resolution - up to 10,000 times better than the Hubble Space telescope.

Ground stations in Australia, Chile, China, Europe, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Ukraine, and the US have promised to take part.

"It will allow us to look into the furthest reaches of the universe with a very sharp resolution and receive data about extra-galactic phenomena," project head Viktor Khartov of the Lavochkin institute told Russian news agencies.

The 5,000 kilogram spacecraft was launched by a Zenith-3M launcher with Fregat-SB upper stage at 6.31am MSK yesterday. It will orbit in an elliptical path, reaching a distance of 390,000 kilometers - further from the Earth than any telescope before.

The telescope's dish is made up of 27 carbon fiber 'petals', which will unfurl in orbit.

Its tasks, during its five-year mission, include collecting data on water masers - clouds of water molecules found in the discs of galaxies. The data should help scietists learn more about the rotation rate of the galaxies, from which the present-day expansion rate of space and the effect of dark energy could be calculated.

It will also study pulsars, to examine the distribution of dust and gas around the exploded stars. And it will examine the event horizon of a black hole at the center of the galaxy M87.

The first images from RadioAstron - also known as Spectrum-R - are expected to be released by the end of the year.>>

A giant new Russian space telescope on Saturday unfurled its dish-like antenna which will observe radio waves from galaxies and black holes billions of light years away.

The operation to deploy the 10-metre-diameter antenna of the Spketr-R telescope, which was launched into orbit on Monday, has been successfully carried out, space agency Roskosmos said in a statement.

[i]The Spektr R spacecraft. If you are thinking it looks nothing like the Hubble Space Telescope, you have it right. Credit: Roscosmos.[/i]

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This is hardly breaking news, but there’s a new Russian space telescope in town. With a name like an anime character, Spektr R was launched on 18 July 2011 and its 10 metre carbon fibre dish was deployed a week later. It’s a radio telescope and – via a very large baseline array project known as RadioAstron – it will become arguably the world’s biggest radio telescope – and by a very long shot.

Following so closely after the Space Shuttle fleet’s retirement, the media has latched onto the idea that this represents a major step up from the Hubble Space Telescope and a further indication of the USA’s decline from space. But, nah…

Don’t get me wrong, when fully operational RadioAstron will be the biggest ever interferometer and is likely to deliver some great science when it gets up to speed. Well done, Roscosmos. But the various comparisons made between it and Hubble are a little spurious.

RadioAstron’s angular resolution is reported as 7 microarc seconds (or 0.000007 arcseconds) while Hubble’s resolution is generally reported as 0.05 arc seconds – so RadioAstron is reported as having over a thousand times more resolution. Well, sort of – but not really.

Firstly, the 10 metre radio mirror of Spektr R is designed to detect (stifles laughter) centimetre range wavelength light, while Hubble’s 2.4 metre mirror, is capable of detecting wavelengths in the visible light range of 350-790 nanometre range (and some non-visible infrared light too).

Angular resolution arises from the relationship between the wavelength of light you are observing and the size of your aperture. So, at the single instrument level Hubble rules supreme in the resolution stakes.

[i]The image detail you can gain from arraying radio telescopes. Blobby false colour becomes more detailed blobby false colour (but there's useful science data there). Credit: VSOP.[/i]

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The resolution assigned to RadioAstron (the telescope array) arises from the ‘virtual’ dish diameter created by Spektr R’s orbit, when arrayed with ground-based radio telescopes – which may eventually include Earth’s largest dish, the 300 metre Arecibo dish and Earth’s largest steerable dish, the 110 metre Greenbank radio telescope.

Spektr R will orbit the Earth via a highly elliptical orbit with a perigee of 10,000 kilometres and an apogee of 390,000 kilometres – so giving an elliptical orbit with a semi-major axis of 200,000 kilometres. That’s sounds like one big dish, huh… although it isn’t, really – just virtually.

But don’t get me wrong, there is a huge increase in information to be gained from arraying Spektr R’s one data point with other ground based observatories’ data points. But nonetheless, it is just radio light conveyed information – which just can’t deliver the level of detail that nanometre wavelength visible light can carry.

That’s why you can usefully create radio telescope arrays, but you can’t gain much value from arraying visible light telescope arrays (at least not yet). The information conveyed by radio light is spread widely enough so that you can estimate the information it is carrying from just detecting it at two widely spread detectors – and then superimposing that data. The fine detailed information contained in visible light is just too complex to allow this.

So putting up RadioAstron up as a contender to the beloved Hubble Space Telescope makes no sense. It is a totally different scientific project that will deliver totally different – and hopefully awesome – scientific data. Ad astra. If we want a step up from Hubble, we need to get the James Webb Space Telescope back into production.

bystander wrote:The Russian Hubble?
Universe Today | Steve Nerlich | 2011 Aug 04

[Spektr-R]’s angular resolution is reported as .007 arcseconds

So putting up RadioAstron up as a contender to the beloved Hubble Space Telescope makes no sense. It is a totally different scientific project that will deliver totally different – and hopefully awesome – scientific data. Ad astra. If we want a step up from Hubble, we need to get the James Webb Space Telescope back into production.