Earlier investigations have shown that there is a preponderance of negative velocities in the hydrogen gas at high latitudes, and that in certain areas very little low-velocity gas occurs. In the region 100° <l< 250°, + 40° <b< + 85°, there appears to be a disturbance, with velocities between - 30 and - 80 km/sec. This ‘streaming’ involves about 3000 (r/100)2solar masses (rin pc). In the same region there is a low surface density at low velocities (|V| < 30 km/sec). About 40% of the gas in the disturbance is in the form of separate concentrations superimposed on a relatively smooth background. The number of these concentrations as a function of velocity remains constant from - 30 to - 60 km/sec but drops rapidly at higher negative velocities. The velocity dispersion in the concentrations varies little about 6·2 km/sec. Concentrations at positive velocities are much less abundant.

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 groundspace 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.

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