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Russia Offers Worldwide Use of its Satellite Navigation System |
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MOSCOW, March 22, 2006/Satnews Daily/ ¾ Russia confirmed anew on Tuesday it will make available its global satellite navigation system for civilian clients in Russia starting next year and for other users worldwide two years later.
Russia’s defense minister Sergei Ivanov said Russia’s Global Navigation Satellite System, known as GLONASS, will be offered to foreign clients worldwide in 2009, according to Russia’s news agencies.
During a visit to NPO Reshetnyov company in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, which builds satellites for the program, Ivanov said GLONASS will have an enormous commercial importance. “It will contribute to the national economy’s development in many spheres,” he said in a televised remark.
GLONASS is the equivalent of the U.S. Global Positioning System, or GPS. Developed during the 1970s, the system originally had 24 satellites, but the number had dwindled.
GLONASS now has 17 satellites, but two of them were temporarily out of order, ITAR-Tass said on Tuesday. The GLONASS cluster is now being expanded to 18 satellites by the year 2007 in keeping with Russia’s federal space program.
The GLONASS cluster has military and civilian users. It is supplying precise coordinates of air, sea, ground and space-based objects round the clock.
In January 2005, Russia successfully launched three GLONASS navigation satellites,
Two years ago, the Russian Information Agency Novosti has already reported that civilian users of the GLONASS satellite system will be allowed to use its navigational data with a higher degree of accuracy.
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