'X-ray beacons' found by Spektr-RG can be used for deep space navigation - RAS president

NOVOSIBIRSK. Sept 1 (Interfax) - The Spektr-RG spacecraft has found about 1 million hard X-ray sources, including those suitable for navigation in deep space, to date, Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) President Alexander Sergeev told Novosibirsk State University students on Thursday.

"One million new [hard X-ray] sources have been found for now, including sources of a new type, which are not visible in other ranges and derive from the behavior of black holes. [...] A great number of periodic sources have been detected in these frequency ranges," Sergeev said.

The task of Spektr-RG is to create a map of the starry sky, four full scans of the starry sky have been completed by now, and periodic X-ray sources can serve as a kind of beacons, he said.

"There is an interesting opportunity of using X-ray beacons for deep space navigation," Sergeev said.

The Spektr-RG spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on July 13, 2019. It was developed with the participation of Germany, within the framework of the Russian federal space program, on the orders from the Russian Academy of Sciences. The observatory houses two X-ray telescopes, including ART-XC made by the RAS Space Research Institute and E-ROSITA made by Germany's MPE, which operate on the principles of oblique-incidence X-ray optics. The telescopes are mounted on the Navigator space platform developed by Russia's NPO Lavochkin and customized to meet the project objectives.

The mission aims to create a full sky map in the soft and hard ranges of the X-ray spectrum with unprecedented sensitivity.