Commenting on April 12, at the request of “Krym.Realii” on Russia’s use of space objects in Crimea for military purposes, ARC expert Borys Babin pointed out that the “space epic” of the invaders in the Crimea should be considered as a copy of the Soviet program, which pursued far from general scientific goals.
He said that until 1990, the Crimean peninsula was used by the former Soviet Union as a base for a “special format of research” – deep space exploration, and a key installation in this process was the RT-70 radio telescope located in Western Crimea.
Babin recalled that since 2020, the Association has been writing about Russians’ attempts to use the “RT-70” radio telescope in international projects of Roscosmos, including the interstate project “Spektr-RG”, which explores the Universe in the X-ray range.
At the same time, from a certain stage, the Russians tried in every possible way to hide the Crimean “RT-70” participation in the project.
Following the publicity, the German Aerospace Center took practical measures in 2022 to shut down its eROSITA telescope as one of two objects of the German-Russian orbital observatory “Spektr-RG” in space.
According to Babin, the project could lead to the formation by the aggressor of new geolocation systems focused on the X-ray radiation of stars, and such systems would certainly be used by all types of Russian troops, in particular for controlling hypersonic missiles.
“In practical terms, the locators of Western Crimea are used both to participate in the telemetry of the aggressor’s military satellite constellation, and to continue extremely unsafe experiments in “long-distance space communications.” Indeed, according to the laws of physics, the “reverse result” from the Soviet experiments started on the “RT-70” could have been received in Vitino from deep space no earlier than 2015,” summed up Borys Babin.
