Russia on Monday will launch the RadioAstron, the biggest ever space telescope that was first conceived during the Cold War.

All set to be launched from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome, the RadioAstron merely has a 10-meter antenna, but it will be launched at a distance almost as far away from Earth as the moon, thus creating a "dish" that will be
30 times the Earth's diameter.

Combining the RadioAstron's signals with those of earthbound telescopes in a process known as interferometry will create images that will be as sharp as those created by a single satellite with a dish as wide as the distance between the space telescope and its partner telescope on Earth. In short, the resolution of images produced by the RadioAstron will be 10,000 times that of images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The RadioAstron will look at far away objects like the galaxy M87, which has a gigantic black hole at its core. The satellite aims to capture images from near the black hole's event horizon, which gulps down everything that comes near it.

In addition it will search for the microwave radiation given off by water masers from the discs of galaxies. Such data will help scientists to determine galaxies' rotation rate and their distance from Earth.

A hunt for pulsars will also be made by the telescope.

Inferometry technology has been in use for the last many years. The first radio interferometry-based telescope, HALCA, was launched by the Japanese Space Agency in the year of 1997.