Russia has launched into space its Spektr-R radio telescope, the first deep space observatory sent up by Moscow in a quarter of a century. Russian space agency Roskosmos, in a statement said Spektr-R, will scour the fringes of the universe for black holes, mysterious quasar radio sources, and also the fast rotating stellar remnants known as pulsars. Roskosmos said the observatory successfully blasted off from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday on a Zenit rocket. Boasting a 10-metre diameter antenna, Spektr-R's creators say that it will be able to produce images with a resolution 100,000 times that of the famed US Hubble Space telescope.Working with ground-based telescopes, Spektr-R will be able to create a virtual base for receiving data 340,000-kilometres long. The telescope comes as Russia seriously returns to deep space exploration after years of absence.