Roscosmos
A success for the launch of the Spektr-RG space telescope
A little more than two hours ago, the Spektr-RG space telescope was launched on a Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. After about two hours it separated from the rocket’s upper stage to head towards the L2 Lagrangian point, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.
The Spektr-RG (Spektr-Roentgen Gamma, SRG) space telescope is a project born from a collaboration of the Russian Roscosmos and German DLR space agencies for the observation of the X-ray sky. This type of astronomy got a bit crippled by the very premature end of the Japanese Hitomi mission while ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra space telescopes are still active but these are missions that started twenty years ago.
The return of three astronauts from the International Space Station marks the end of Expedition 59
A few hours ago astronauts Anne McClain and David Saint-Jacques and cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko returned to Earth on the Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft, that landed without problems in Kazakhstan. The three of them spent a bit more than 6 months on the International Space Station, where they arrived on December 3, 2018 as part of Expedition 58.
The Trace Gas Orbiter space probe detected water but not methane on Mars
Two articles published in the journal “Nature” report the main results of the first year of work of ESA and Roscosmos’ Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), part of the ExoMars program. One article concerns the impact of the global storm that covered the planet Mars with a dust on the water in the atmosphere, while the other article reports the lack of methane detections, at least for now frustrating the hopes of discovering its origin. A third article submitted to the journal “Proceedings of the Russian Academy of Science” offers the most detailed map created so far of water ice and hydrated minerals present immediately below the red planet’s surface.
The Russian spacecraft Progress MS-11 has reached the International Space Station
A few hours ago the Progress MS-11 spacecraft blasted off atop a Soyuz 2.1a rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. After about nine minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage and was placed on its ultra-fast track in its resupply mission to the International Space Station also called Progress 72 or 72P. After almost 3.5 hours it reached the International Space Station docking with its Pirs module.
