RadioAstron space-VLBI project: studies of masers in star forming
  regions of our Galaxy and megamasers in external galaxies
  Observations of the masers in the course of RadioAstron mission yielded
detections of fringes for a number of sources in both water and hydroxyl maser
transitions. Several sources display numerous ultra-compact details. This
proves that implementation of the space VLBI technique for maser studies is
possible technically and is not always prevented by the interstellar
scattering, maser beaming and other effects related to formation, transfer, and
detection of the cosmic maser emission. For the first time, cosmic water maser
emission was detected with projected baselines exceeding Earth Diameter. It was
detected in a number of star-forming regions in the Galaxy and megamaser
galaxies NGC 4258 and NGC 3079. RadioAstron observations provided the absolute
record of the angular resolution in astronomy. Fringes from the NGC 4258
megamaser were detected on baseline exceeding 25 Earth Diameters. This means
that the angular resolution sufficient to measure the parallax of the water
maser source in the nearby galaxy LMC was directly achieved in the cosmic maser
observations. Very compact features with angular sizes about 20 microarcsec
have been detected in star-forming regions of our Galaxy. Corresponding linear
sizes are about 5-10 million kilometers. So, the major step from milli- to
micro-arcsecond resolution in maser studies is done in the RadioAstron mission.
The existence of the features with extremely small angular sizes is
established. Further implementations of the space-VLBI maser instrument for
studies of the nature of cosmic objects, studies of the interaction of
extremely high radiation field with molecular material and studies of the
matter on the line of sight are planned.
