It was launched on 1 December 1989 aboard a Proton rocket and placed in a highly eccentric four-day orbit, of which three were devoted to observations.

In September 1994, after nearly five years of directed observations, the gas supply for its attitude control was exhausted and the observatory was placed in a non-directed survey mode.

The power made available to the scientific instruments was approximately 400 W.[1] The spacecraft was launched on 1 December 1989 aboard a Proton-K from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakh SSR.

[8] Its imaging capabilities were derived from the association of a coded mask and a position sensitive detector based on the Anger camera principle.

There were four identical modules of the ART-P telescope, each consisting of a position sensitive multi-wire proportional counter (MWPC) together with a URA coded mask.

The maximum time resolution was 4 ms.[3][8] The ART-S X-ray spectrometer, also built by the IKI, covered the energy range 3 to 100 keV.

[3] The PHEBUS experiment was designed by CESR (Toulouse) to record high energy transient events in the range 100 keV to 100 MeV.

The burst mode was triggered when the count rate in the 0.1 to 1.5 MeV energy range exceeded the background level by 8 sigma in either 0.25 or 1.0 seconds.

[3] Starting in January 1990, four WATCH instruments, designed by the Danish Space Research Institute, were in operation on the Granat observatory.

During quiet periods, count rates in two energy bands (6 to 15 and 15 to 180 keV) were accumulated for 4, 8, or 16 seconds, depending on onboard computer memory availability.

[3] The KONUS-B instrument, designed by the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in St. Petersburg, consisted of seven detectors distributed around the spacecraft that responded to photons of 10 keV to 8 MeV energy.

With the breakup of the Union, the Crimea region found itself part of the newly independent Ukraine and the center was put under Ukrainian national control, prompting new political hurdles.

[1] The main and most urgent problem, however, was in finding funds to support the continued operation of the spacecraft amid the spending crunch in post-Soviet Russia.

The French space agency, having already contributed significantly to the project (both scientifically and financially), took upon itself to fund the continuing operations directly.