A UV space telescope originally planned in the Soviet Union has regained traction as the Russian-led World Space Observatory and is set for launch in the first part of the next decade.
“It will be a multipurpose observatory,” says WSO principal investigator Boris Shustov, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Astronomy in Moscow. Topics of study will include a search for missing baryonic matter in the intergalactic medium, the composition of atmospheres of exoplanets, and accretion physics in star formation and galaxy evolution. The WSO, he adds, “is the only large-scale facility planned in the UV in the next 15 years.”
“The WSO is a follow-on to the Hubble [Space Telescope ],” says the University of Leicester’s Martin Barstow. “Whereas the JWST [James Webb Space Telescope , NASA’s successor to the HST ] doesn’t deal with the optical and UV part of what the...
