Russia launches powerful X-Ray telescope

Almaty: Russia's space agency launched a powerful telescope into space on Saturday as part of a scientific mission to map the sky using X-rays.

The Spektr-RG space observatory was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard a Proton-M launch vehicle.

The project is being carried out as part of an agreement signed between Roscosmos and the German Aerospace Center on August 18 2009.

According to the space agency, Spektr-RG is an astrophysical space observatory aimed at studying the universe in the X-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The scientific goal of the observatory is to map all massive structures in the observable universe in X-rays.

As per the observatory's schedule, Spektr-RG will cruise to the Lagrange Point 2 located 1.5 million kilometres from Earth before beginning a 4-year all sky survey.

The observatory is expected to detect around 100,000 clusters of galaxies and three million supermassive black holes.