A Broadband Imaging X-ray All-sky Survey, or ABRIXAS, was a space-based

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

X-ray telescope An X-ray telescope (XRT) is a telescope that is designed to observe remote objects in the X-ray spectrum. X-rays are absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere, so instruments to detect X-rays must be taken to high altitude by balloons, sounding rockets ...

. It was launched on 28 April 1999 in a

Kosmos-3M The Kosmos-3M ( meaning "''Cosmos''", GRAU index 11K65M) was a Russian space launch vehicle, member of the Kosmos (rocket family), Kosmos rocket family. It was a liquid-fueled two-stage launch vehicle, first launched in 1967 and with over 420 s ...

launch vehicle from

Kapustin Yar Kapustin Yar () is a Russian military training area and a rocket launch complex in Astrakhan Oblast, about 100 km east of Volgograd. It was established by the Soviet Union on 13 May 1946. In the beginning, Kapustin Yar used technology, material ...

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

, into Earth orbit. The orbit had a

periapsis An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. The line of apsides (also called apse line, or major axis of the orbit) is the line connecting the two extreme values. Apsides perta ...

of , an

apoapsis An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. The line of apsides (also called apse line, or major axis of the orbit) is the line connecting the two extreme values. Apsides perta ...

of , an

inclination Orbital inclination measures the tilt of an object's orbit around a celestial body. It is expressed as the angle between a reference plane and the orbital plane or axis of direction of the orbiting object. For a satellite orbiting the Eart ...

of 48.0° and an

eccentricity Eccentricity or eccentric may refer to: * Eccentricity (behavior), odd behavior on the part of a person, as opposed to being "normal" Mathematics, science and technology Mathematics * Off-Centre (geometry), center, in geometry * Eccentricity (g ...

of 0.00352, giving it a period of 96 minutes. The telescope's battery was accidentally overcharged and destroyed three days after the mission started. When attempts to communicate with the satellite – while its solar panels were illuminated by sunlight – failed, the $20 million project was abandoned. ABRIXAS decayed from orbit on 31 October 2017. The eROSITA telescope was based on the design of the ABRIXAS observatory. eROSITA was launched on board the

Spektr-RG Spektr-RG ( Russian: Спектр-РГ, ''Spectrum'' + '' Röntgen'' + ''Gamma''; also called Spectrum-X-Gamma, SRG, SXG) is a Russian–German high-energy astrophysics space observatory which was launched on 13 July 2019. It follows on from t ...

space observatory on 13 July 2019 from

Baikonur Baikonur ( ; ) is a city in Kazakhstan on the northern bank of the Syr Darya river. It is currently leased and administered by the Russian Federation as an enclave until 2050. It was constructed to serve the Baikonur Cosmodrome with adminis ...

to be deployed at the second

Lagrange point In celestial mechanics, the Lagrange points (; also Lagrangian points or libration points) are points of equilibrium for small-mass objects under the gravitational influence of two massive orbiting bodies. Mathematically, this involves t ...

(L2).

See also

References

Further reading