GLONASS 743 Set Healthy, Constellation Back to Full Strength

News courtesy of CANSPACE Listserv.

GLONASS 743, recently moved from orbital slot 2 to orbital slot 8, was set healthy on March 5 at 07:28 Moscow Time according to NAGU 017-130305. Although the NAGU states that Moscow Time is three hours ahead of UTC (and this is the time difference normally used for GLONASS as stipulated in the GLONASS ICD), officially, it is actually four hours and has been since the switch to year-round daylight saving time on 27 March 2011. In this case, the NAGU appears to be in error since GLONASS 743 was actually set healthy at 03:28 UTC and not at 04:28 UTC. This is confirmed by Roscomos monitoring and by the navigation data collected by stations of the International GNSS Service (IGS).

There are once again 24 healthy GLONASS satellites on orbit.

For those keeping track of frequency channel changes, GLONASS 743 was switched from frequency channel 6 to channel -6 on 1 March some minutes before 10:45 UTC and back to channel 6 on 2 March, again some minutes before 10:45 UTC as determined from IGS navigation files. Although a NAGU was issued for the first frequency change (stating that it occurred at “1344 MT (UTC+0300)”), no NAGU has been issued to document the second frequency shift although the set-healthy NAGU does give the frequency channel as 6.

Meanwhile, in other GLONASS news, a single GLONASS-M satellite (Block 47s) is to be launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on April 26 at 05:23:41 UTC according to the NASA Forum blog.