Moscow - Three Russian satellites crashed into the Pacific Ocean on Sunday after a failed launch, in a setback to a Kremlin project designed as a rival to the widely used US GPS navigation technology.
Russian news agencies said the satellites veered off course and crashed near Hawaii after blasting off from Russia's Baikonur space centre in Kazakhstan.
The Khrunichev Space Centre said the satellites had failed to enter the right orbit after the launch went wrong 10 minutes after take-off.
In a separate statement, space agency Roscosmos said that, “according to the results of our telemetric analysis, it has been determined that the group of satellites went off orbit”.
Both agencies said specialists were trying to work out what went wrong.
The satellites were the last of a batch of 24 at the heart of Russia's GLONASS, or Global Navigation System, its answer to the US Global Positioning System (GPS). - Reuters