Faulty Software Determined Cause of GLONASS Failures

April 25, 2014 - By GPS World Staff

The two April failures in Russia’s GLONASS were caused by mathematical mistakes in software, according to Oleg Ostapenko, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

Russian newspaper Ria Novosti reported on a press conference where Ostapenko said that programmers who had designed the satellites’ new software had made 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 said that the remaining problems would be solved by mid-May, and there is almost no chance of a similar failure happening in the future.