OREANDA-NEWS. A rocket, carrying the Glonass-M №55 navigation spacecraft, lifted off from the Plesetsk launch site at 21:16 Moscow time on June 14, 2014. The satellite was built by the Reshetnev Company.

The spacecraft rode into orbit aboard a Soyuz 2.1b / Fregat launch vehicle. Ground controllers at the System Control Center located in Krasnoznamensk (Moscow region) and ISS-Reshetnev's Information and Computation Complex (Zheleznogorsk) have successfully established contact with the satellite. According to the telemetry received from Glonass-M №55, the satellite is in good health, all its mechanical subsystems have deployed normally, Sun and Earth acquisition have been performed as designed.

Glonass-M №55 was put into the third orbital plane to provide positioning services from its orbital slot № 21.

The Glonass-M №55 satellite is equipped with the experimental payload capable of transmitting signals in the L3 frequency band. The experiment will include flight testing of the new equipment and evaluation of the accuracy characteristics.