Three Additional Satellites Launched in Russia

While the Russians were busy shopping for the Christmas and holiday, the Russian Federal Space Agency was also busy preparing their own package for the entire nation and the GNSS industry. The agency announced that it has successfully launched a Proton-M carrier rocket with three Glonass satellites on board from the Baikonur space centre located in Kazakhstan. With these three recent launches, the Glonass satellite constellation in space will amount to eighteen satellites and experts believe that if all the three can be put to service, it will provide enough navigation services to all of Russia. The agency has also revealed plan to fully explore its technology in space and plan is on the way to offer a fully operating constellation of 24 Glonass satellites which will be enough to provide positioning service over the entire globe by the year 2010, this they said will complement the US GPS constellation. Six Glonass satellites are scheduled for launch in 2008, and the first two improved Glonass-K satellites are scheduled for launch the following year, according to RIA Novosti reports.