After the Russian attack on Ukraine, all cooperation with Russia is on hold. The Max Planck Institute is also stopping the joint space project with the Erosita satellite telescope. However, Moscow does not want to stick to it – and risks serious consequences.
The Russian space agency Roskosmos wants to put the German satellite telescope Erosita back into operation despite the Berlin-broken off cooperation. “I gave the order to start restoring the work of the German telescope in the Spektr-RG system together with the Russian telescope,” Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said in a television interview.
The telescope had been put into sleep mode by the German Max Planck Institute because of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and the subsequent Western sanctions against Moscow. Erosita was launched in 2019 on board the Russian satellite Spektrum-Röntgen-Gamma (Spektr-RG) with a Proton rocket. Together with a Russian telescope, it is used for space observation and can illuminate galaxies millions of kilometers away from Earth.
Russian and German researchers were able to evaluate the data together. One of the aims of the joint scientific mission was to detect black holes in nearby galaxies. Rogozin now unilaterally wants to resume the observations stopped by Germany after the beginning of the war by taking over the telescope. “Those who made this decision (to stop cooperation) today have no moral right to stop research for humanity, if only because their fascist attitude is similar to that of our enemies,” said the Russian top executive .
However, the scientific director of the Spectrum-X-ray-Gamma project, Rashid Syunyaev, warned against unilateral steps. The restart can only take place with the German consent – otherwise the telescope threatens to break. Rogozin, a former Russian ambassador to NATO, has long profiled himself as a hardliner toward the West. In view of the US sanctions following the Russian invasion of Crimea, he declared in 2014 that US astronauts should please fly to the International Space Station “on the trampoline” in future. He is also a vocal supporter of the war against Ukraine.
