В статье приводятся результаты наземных РСДБ экспериментов, выполненных на частотах проекта “РадиоАстрон”, между РСДБ пунктами Симеиз (РТ-22)–Евпатория (РТ-70) и Симеиз (РТ-22)–Пущино (РТ-22).

The Russian Academy of Sciences and Federal Space Agency, together with the participation of many international organizations, worked toward the launch of the RadioAstron orbiting space observatory with its onboard 10-m reflector radio telescope from the Baikonur cosmodrome on July 18, 2011. Together with some of the largest ground-based radio telescopes and a set of stations for tracking, collecting, and reducing the data obtained, this space radio telescope forms a multi-antenna ground-space radio interferometer with extremely long baselines, making it possible for the first time to study various objects in the Universe with angular resolutions a million times better than is possible with the human eye. The project is targeted at systematic studies of compact radio-emitting sources and their dynamics. Objects to be studied include supermassive black holes, accretion disks, and relativistic jets in active galactic nuclei, stellar-mass black holes, neutron stars and hypothetical quark stars, regions of formation of stars and planetary systems in our and other galaxies, interplanetary and interstellar plasma, and the gravitational field of the Earth. The results of ground-based and inflight tests of the space radio telescope carried out in both autonomous and ground-space interferometric regimes are reported. The derived characteristics are in agreement with the main requirements of the project. The astrophysical science program has begun.

We present the results of long-term, three-frequency monitoring of giant pulses from the Crab pulsar on the 64-m radio telescope in Kalyazin. The total monitoring time was 160 hours. The signal power was recorded simultaneously at 600, 1650, and 4850 MHz via direct sampling of the received signals in the total receiver bandwidth without any compensation for interstellar dispersion. In total, 1117 and 352 giant pulses were detected at 600 and 4850 MHz, respectively. The frequency band centered at 1650 MHz was contaminated by interference, and was used only to identify events found in other frequency bands. The cumulative energy distribution of the giant pulses follows a power law at 600 and 4850 MHz up to the highest energies. A deep modulation in the radio spectra of individual giant pulses was observed on both large (Δ v/v ≈ 0.5) and small (Δ v/v ≈ (2−4) × 10 −3 ) frequency scales. The simultaneous appearance of giant pulses at the interpulse longitudes at high (4850 MHz) and low (1650 and/or 600 MHz) frequencies testifies to their common origin, in spite of the observed differences in other parameters.

The 64-m radio telescope equipped with an S-2 recording system in the town of Kalyazin was involved in an international fine-structure survey of quasars and active galactic nuclei carried out with a ground-based—space radio interferometer. The HALCA Japanese satellite in an orbit with an altitude of up to 24 000 km with an 8-m antenna was used as a space element of the interferometer. A radio image of the inner region of the CSS-type quasar 3C 147 was obtained with an angular resolution of ∼0.3 mas at 6 cm. The image exhibits a core and several jet components mostly arranged in the main jet direction, but one of the components moves across the jet. No evidence was found for the superluminal separation of jet components. The estimated brightness temperature,∼1011 K, is consistent with the theoretical limit imposed by synchro-Compton radiation.

The Soviet VLBI network includes parabolic 70-m antennas located near Usuriisk and Eupatoria, a 64-m antenna in Bear Lake, 22-m antennas in Pushino and Simeiz, and a 25-m antenna near Ulan-Ude. The maximum baseline length in the E–W direction is equal to about 7000 km, and in the N–S direction is equal to 1300 km. The minimum baseline length is equal to about 100 km.