Assembling Glonass-M navigation satellite. © RIA Novosti: Alexandr Kryazhev.

Russia will launch a new satellite for the GLONASS navigation system from its northern Plesetsk Cosmodrome in June, a senior Russian space agency official said last Wednesday, while the recent outages have been blamed on a coding error.

“The next launch of a GLONASS-M [satellite] is scheduled for June 14 from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome,” Roscosmos deputy chief Anatoly Shilov told an international navigation forum in Moscow.

The GLObal NAvigation Satellite System (GLONASS), which came online in 1993, recently came to the spotlight, as it suffered two outages this month, which we mentioned in the Best of the Blogs last week.

In fact, RIA Novosti has reported that the outage was caused by mathematical mistakes in software.

Head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, Oleg Ostapenko, said during a press conference that the programmers who had designed the satellites’ new software had committed several mathematical mistakes, but the problem was not major and has practically been solved.

“There were some mathematical mistakes, but they have been corrected,” he said.

Ostapenko added that there were some remaining problems that would be solved by mid-May, and added that there is ‘next to zero’ chance of a similar failure happening in the future.

The constellation of 24 operational GLONASS satellites provides navigational coverage to the entire globe.