“Beauty of this is that you can get the entire large-scale structure of the Universe in x-rays, revealing very early clusters, which is possible to see,” Mikhail Pavlinsky of Moscow Space Research Institute told planetary.org, “...it will make it possible to practically totally catalog all galaxy clusters which formed in our Universe.”

Although the US German ROSAT space observatory mapped the x-ray sky in the 1990s, Spektr-RG should boost the clarity of the picture by orders of magnitude. ‘The sensitivity of the survey will be 30 times deeper than that achieved by ROSAT,” Pavlinsky said.

To achieve such sharpness, Spektr-RG carries two telescopes: German-built eROSITA and the Russian ART-XC. “We have best x-ray CCD camera ever flown and eROSITA has seven of them simultaneously,” Dr. Peter Predehl, from Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, which built the instrument, wrote in an e-mail to planetary.org.

According to Russian sources, eROSITA is the most complex and expensive piece of hardware ever imported to Russia by the German Space Agency, DLR. The price tug for the telescope is estimated at around 100 million Euro.

Not to be outdone, IKI in Moscow and their colleagues from Russia’s premier nuclear research center, VNIEEF, developed an ART-XC telescope, which will expand the sensitivity of the observatory toward so-called “harder” range of x-ray radiation.

Earthly problems

However, before technological marvels of Spektr-RG can begin their pioneering work, its creators must conclude an almost quarter of a century-long saga of building Spektr-RG. The project traces its roots all the way to the 1980s, when Soviet engineers conceived a follow-on satellite to the Granat observatory, launched in 1989.

The initial scheme, which involved more than a dozen countries and five telescopes installed on a nearly six-ton spacecraft, collapsed a decade after the USSR. It was eventually reborn in the first decade of the 21st century with only two surviving participants – Russia and Germany.

After many technical challenges, assembly of the two telescopes finally began, when the Russian-Ukrainian conflict almost derailed the project. The Russian ART-XC telescope depended on a set of unique x-ray mirrors, which were ordered after a long search from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. They were almost completed when Russia annexed Crimea in the spring of 2014. All contacts between Russian and American scientists were suddenly cut, subject to sanctions. Fortunately, after agonized lobbying of scientists on both sides, the US State Department made an exception for Spektr-RG. The observatory was reportedly second on the list of allowed cooperative projects after the International Space Station!

In fact, by most accounts, Spektr-RG ended up being the only Russian spacecraft with sophisticated US hardware onboard. However, the fallout from the Crimean crisis is not over yet. As German and Russian scientists are gearing up for the final assembly of the flight-worthy spacecraft at the beginning of next year, there is a new potential time bomb.