Radioastron (Spectr-R project)—a radio telescope much larger than the earth: Ground segment and key science areas

The space interferometer Radioastron is working jointly with the largest radio telescopes of the world. Ground tracking stations provide for retrieving the information and determining the orbital parameters for data processing centers. The project is aimed at systematic studies of images of radio emitting regions, their coordinates, and time-dependent variations near super-massive black holes in galactic nuclei, stellarmass black holes, neutron and quark stars, regions of star and planet formation in our and other galaxies, the structure of interplanetary and interstellar plasma, and the Earth’s gravitational field.