GLOIMASS on the Verge of a New Decade

摘要

The year 2020 heralds the end of another 10-year stage of development of the Russian GLObal NAvigation Satellite System (GLONASS). Reconstruction of our orbital constellation, started in 2006, is bearing its fruit. Today, it is hard to imagine ones daily life without the continuous artificial radio-navigation field provided to users globally by the GLONASS orbital constellation since 2011. GLONASS signals are employed to perform a wide range of tasks, such as 1. Saving lives in road accidents 2. Air, ground and naval traffic monitoring and control 3. Network synchronization of mobile cellular communications 4. Monitoring and enabling the energy grid, road travel, agricultural equipment operation, and more. Our orbital constellation is built upon a base of second-generation spacecraft (SC) - Glonass-M SC - that was developed in 2003 and has demonstrated outstanding operational capacity: 14 SC are already operating well beyond their expected lifetimes, and four SC celebrate their 13th birthday in orbit this year. Activities focused on improving GLONASS accuracy have not stopped for a single day. If we go back to 2014, the SC-based ranging offset (which specialists refer as equivalent ranging deviation) was 1.4 m. We managed to achieve 0.9 m offset on Jan. 30, 2020, and during the same week the offset did not exceed 1.15 m. Furthermore, the penultimate series-produced Glonass-M SC (Cosmos-2545), which was launched on March 30, demonstrated basic service ranging accuracy of 0.38 m on a daily interval and 0.63 m accuracy on the "best week" interval.