The collapsed Soviet Union abandoned Spektr-RG once before. Its revival launches July 12, 2019.

Struggle to the Launchpad

The Russian Spektr-RG satellite, revived after being cancelled in 2002, has been pushed back to a July launch date. This is a backup date, after the project was delayed again last June.

Last month, Russian State Space Corporation Roskosmos publicly announced the July pushback, citing issues with the three-stage Proton rocket during assembly, a rocket with an already defective history:

“During preparations for the launch of the Proton-M carrier rocket equipped with the DM-03 upper stage, a minor flaw was detected. The State Commission has decided to delay the launch to a backup date,” Russia’s Roskosmos Space Corporation said. Russian News Agency TASS, June 20, 2019

Proton-M’s Track Record

ExoMars 2016 sets sail for Mars

The Moscow Times states Proton rockets have been launched some 400 times since its conception in 1967, and at one point was firing off 30% of commercial satellites sent to orbit.

In 2013, Flight Global’s Ascend SpaceTrak database reported the Proton rocket had its fifth launch failure in a four-year period. That failure marked a 30% overall failure rate, severely lacking from its Western peers over at the ESA. Comparably, the European Space Agency’s Ariane-5 rocket has seen a 6% failure rate over 69 launches, the same period in which Proton-M was struggling to deliver its high capacity of commercial and state payloads.

Flight Global states the Proton-M had a running rate of less than 90% over 74 launches.

Three Decades in the Making

Spektr RG—Spectrum-Roentgen Gamma—is a joint Russian Federal Space Agency project in collaboration with the German Aerospace Center, as well as universities and research centers across both countries. The observatory satellite will study our interplanetary magnetic field, galaxies and black holes with instruments that can utilize the X-band spectrum.

Longtime Russian space giants Roskomos has been shakily developing the Spektr family iterations since the early 1980s.

It is third in a family of Spektr-series satellites equipped with X-band technologies. In 1987, the Soviet Academy of Science and Glavkosmos USSR issued the following schedule (via russianspaceweb.com):

1993: Spektr-RG, or AM-3 with X-ray instruments

1995: Spektr-R (a.k.a. Radioastron or Spektr-KR or Spektr-KRT), carrying a radio telescope

1997: Spektr-UF, or AM-2 with an ultraviolet telescope

1999: Spektr-IK

Roskomos ran into trouble when the breakup of the Soviet Union caused federal funding to, naturally, collapse. The early 1990s saw the space budget be directed toward the Mars-96 project, only to be fulfilled again after its loss in 1996.

Related: Official NASA file summary of the Mars-96 crash.

Family Affairs

First in line following Russia’s Mars devastation was Spektr-RG, the versatile X-ray observatory satellite leaders were excited to finally launch after a hiatus of funding. This time, Roskomos even had a net of international documents being signed to aid its final development.

However, international actors were hesitant to help when looking over the original 1989 Spektr anti-satellite system.

Roskomos assured the world Spektr-RG would be very different than its military sibling—as well as its future sibling Spektr-R, an observational satellite seeing in four bands that would be launched in 2011.

Related: Spektr-R was declared over after going offline in April 2019.

NASA promised in 1996 to supply the project with ground control recording stations to support the Spektr-R mission.

Here’s a timeline of Spektr-R, all the way up to its July 16, 2011 launch (1982-2011).

Reviving Spektr-RG

The 2019 Spektr-RG

Cancelled in 2002 with no room for simultaneous funding left, Spektr-RG will finally reach the launch pad this July.

The July launch of Spektr-RG will carry eROSITA, a German-developed instrument that will conduct a 7-year X-ray survey. Though capable of more extreme bands, it will begin in a medium band up to 10 keV, to detect the most massive thing in our universe—galaxy clusters (via https://www.mpe.mpg.de/eROSITA).

Galaxy clusters are exactly what they seem, being clusters of galaxies held together by the force of gravity. Supernova events tend to cause these clusters to hold in their gas, and even the most visible stars making up these clusters are only a fraction of its total composition.

Which is why Spektr-RG and the eROSITA team is excited to reveal up to 100,000 clusters with their all-sky survey. The satellite will also be equipped with Russian ART-XC Coded-mask telescopes for continual observation.

Plus, the instrument qualifies the craft to be very much defined as “X-ray observatory”. That’s satisfying to say after three decades, right?

Spektr-RG is a joint Russian-German project with a goal “to map all massive structures in the observable Universe in X-rays,” making “an all-sky survey… with unprecedented spectral and angular resolution,” Roskosmos said.

George Lansbury, an X-ray astronomer at the Institute of Astronomy, calls the upcoming mission revolutionary, something that will definitely be in the “the big data regime” (via sciencemag.org).

The family is doing so well there’s even a successor lined up: Spektr-UV. Scientists will have to wait for this one, with an optimistic 2025 launch date that has already been through the gauntlet of redesigns and budget crises.

Understanding Dark Energy

In addition to an all-sky survey, eROSITA will attempt to study the nature of dark energy, the force believed to be causing our universe to expand.

Scientists currently believe our universe is (via space.com):

68% dark energy

27% dark matter

5% the things we can actually observe

Assembled eROSITA (via https://www.luftfahrtmagazin.de/ )

Because eROSITA’s revealed galaxy clusters will be extremely hot, Spektr-RG should be quick to notice the dark energy moving from them—as well as how fast they travel, making the mission revolutionary in the field of dark energy/matter investigation.

eROSITA and Spektr-RG will be providing unprecedented data for years as it pans the sky from its quiet position just beyond the moon.

From roots planted in 1982, Spektr-RG will launch July 12, 2019, on a mission too great for politics to destroy.