Sergei Ivanov: New satellites to join in Glonass GNSS after old ones' service life expires
MOSCOW. April 23 (Interfax-AVN) - The Glonass global navigation satellite system (GNSS) will incorporate new satellites as needed and its precision will be gradually improving to the U.S. GPS levels, Kremlin administration head Sergei Ivanov said at the opening of the International Navigation Satellite Forum in Moscow on Wednesday.
"We will expand the system whenever that is necessary, after the service life of operating satellites expires. Funds were mostly spent on the construction of satellites at the beginning of the deployment of the satellite cluster. That was expensive. Now the cluster has been installed and the Glonass federal target program mostly assigns funds for hardware and ground infrastructure," Ivanov said.
"The GNSS precision has considerably improved in the recent years," the presidential administration chief continued.
The current precision is 2.9 meters, and the precision of GPS navigation service is 1.8 meters. "GPS is still ahead of us but this gap is shrinking. We are catching up," Ivanov said.
Russia will continue to improve the quality of Glonass service and develop the orbital and ground infrastructure. "We will also improve the reliability of Glonass. As you know, there has been a glitch but its causes are being detected," Ivanov said.
The Glonass system's endurance of any external factors will grow, navigation cartography will be upgraded, and domestic production of electronic components will be promoted, he said. "This is the only way to make Glonass a truly mass product on the domestic and foreign markets," he indicated.
The trial run of the ERA-Glonass traffic emergency response network, which is bound to significantly accelerate the arrival of help, started this year, Ivanov said.
"We expect to begin the commercial operation of ERA-Glonass both in the Russian Federation and all countries of the Customs Union already next year," the presidential administration head noted.