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Vincent Padois, head tutor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University who teaches robotics and is babysitting the Paris ICub, makes a demonstration with ICub robot, a ?hybrid embodied cognitive system for a humanoid robot" about 1 metre (3.2 feet) high, at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris September 4, 2009. Six versions of ICub exist in laboratories across Europe, where scientists are painstakingly tweaking its electronic brain to make it capable of learning, just like a human child and hoping it will learn how to adapt its behaviour to changing circumstances, offering new insights into the development of human consciousness. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

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    Russia launches final satellites for its own GPS

    MOSCOW
    Wed Dec 26, 2007 2:01pm EST
    Engineers work on a Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) satellite at the NPO PM applied mechanics institute in the Siberian city of Zheleznogorsk, July 10, 2007. Russia successfully launched a rocket on Tuesday carrying the last three satellites to complete a navigation system to rival America's GPS. REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin

    MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia successfully launched a rocket on Tuesday carrying the last three satellites to complete a navigation system to rival America's GPS.

    Technology

    The military-run GLONASS mapping system works over most of Russia and is expected to cover the globe by the end of 2009, once all its 24 navigational satellites are operating.

    A space rocket blasted off from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome on the steppes of neighboring ex-Soviet Kazakhstan, from which Russia rents the facility.

    "The launch was carried out smoothly at 10:32 p.m. (1932 GMT)," RIA news agency quoted a spokesman for the Russian space agency as saying. "We expect satellites to separate from the booster on the orbit at 2:24 a.m. (2324 GMT)".

    Work on GLONASS -- or Global Navigation Satellite System -- began in the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s to give its armed forces exact bearings around the world.

    The collapse of the Russian economy in the late 1990s drained funds and the plans withered, but President Vladimir Putin has ensured the project is now being lavishly funded from a brimming government budget.

    Officials said GLONASS would mainly be used alongside the U.S. global positioning system, which Washington can switch off for civilian subscribers, as it did during recent military operations in Iraq.

    (Writing by Chris Baldwin, editing by Richard Meares)
    Technology


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