FARNBOROUGH, Britain. July 16 (Interfax-AVN) - Russia's Spektr-R orbital radio telescope, launched a year ago as part of the RadioAstron project, has enabled scientists to look back 5 billion years, said the chief executive of Russia's NPO Lavochkin aerospace company.
"Recently data were obtained with the telescope on the structure of objects that are 5 billion light years from Earth. This means that the age of the picture that has been obtained is about 5 billion years. It's a unique result," Viktor Khartov told Interfax-AVN during the current international aerospace show at Farnborough.
"From the point of view of resolution, Russia has seriously outperformed all countries. If you look at the principle of collaboration between the spacecraft and ground-based radio telescopes, you have a device whose size is 30,000 kilometers," Khartov said.
Two more RadioAstron telescopes are to be launched within the next few years - Spektr RG in 2014 and Spektr UF in 2015, he said.
Spektr-R, developed under a commission from by the Russian Federal Space Agency and launched on July 18, 2011, is a device for studying the solar wind, the interplanetary magnetic field, galaxies, quasars, black holes and neutron stars.
Khartov said there is a lot of interest in RadioAstron among Western scientists.