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ART-XC telescope: two months of work

Russia’s Spektr-RG orbital observatory continues its active work circling around the Sun-Earth L2 libration point. The image below shows the survey map composed by ART-XC Russian telescope starting from December 8, 2019 till February 9, 2020. Two months saw the telescope cover 26% of all the sky, more than 10,000 square deg.

The map was received from all the detected photons in the hard x-ray energy range 4-30 keV. Red dots mark the polar areas of the surveying where higher exposure is observed increasing the number of registered photons (dark-violet to yellow color show the number of photons from low to high).

The peculiarities of the spacecraft working orbit are that during the first two months Spektr-RG conducts the survey with the daily angular rotation speed of less than a degree. The minimal rotation speed (0.65 deg./day) was registered in late January – now it has started growing, so in half a year the full survey will be ready.

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Spektr-RG spacecraft was designed by NPO Lavochkin and launched on July 13, 2019. The creation process went in cooperation with Germany as part of Russia’s Federal Space Program on behalf of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The space observatory is equipped with two unique X-ray telescopes: ART-XC (Russia) and eROSITA (Germany), its functioning based on oblique incidence principle.

The main task of the mission is mapping the sky in the soft (0.3-8 keV) and hard x-ray ranges with unprecedented sensibility. While surveying the sky, Spektr-RG is expected to detect about 3 millions of accretive supermassive black holes, 100,000 galaxy clusters, hundreds of thousands of stars with active coronas and accretive white dwarf stars, tens of thousands of star-forming galaxies and many other objects including those of unknown nature. This data is of extreme importance to understand the distribution of the matter in the Universe, the role of dark energy in its development and how the supermassive dark holes appeared and grew.