China’s BeiDou and Russian GLONASS sign new deal to rival America’s GPS satellite navigation

Latest satellite navigation systems deal among 16 signed as Vladimir Putin met Xi Jinping in Beijing
Agreement promises to ensure ‘complementarity of the global navigation satellite systems in terms of system timescales’, in a step up from a 2018 deal

Science

Liu Zhen

Published: 3:00pm, 5 Feb 2022

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China and Russia have agreed to coordinate their satellite navigation systems as the two countries further solidify their partnership to rival the US-owned GPS.

This comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed “unprecedented” close ties with China at a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing ahead of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony.

A total of 16 deals were confirmed during the meeting, including one for 10 billion cubic metres (353 billion cubic feet) of Russian gas to be supplied to China per year via a new pipeline.

An agreement was also signed between the operators of the Russian high-altitude satellite system GLONASS and China’s BeiDou, “on cooperation in the field of ensuring the complementarity of the global navigation satellite systems in terms of system timescales”, according to the document list issued by the Kremlin.

The details of the agreement were not disclosed. But it follows and further develops a 2018 agreement between the two governments to shape a framework for the two systems joining forces.

Titled “Cooperation in the peaceful use of the BeiDou and GLONASS”, that deal took effect in 2019.

Moscow and Beijing had then pledged to cooperate in the compatibility and interoperability of BeiDou and GLONASS. The new agreement’s aim to ensure “the complementarity of system timescales” was part of the compatibility and interoperability effort, experts said.

“That is to say, both sides would coordinate well during their programming to maximise the use of resources of both systems in the future,” Clark Shu, telecommunications researcher at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, said.

“For example, when a BeiDou satellite covers a Moscow area between 0700 to 0900 [hours], a GLONASS satellite could be spared to cover the St Petersburg area during the same period or take over Moscow from 1000 to 1200 [hours].”

China launched its BeiDou, or Northern Dipper (the ancient Chinese name for the seven brightest stars of the Ursa Major constellation) programme in the 1990s. This came amid concerns that its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would be vulnerable without a satellite navigation system alternative to the GPS (Global Positioning System), owned by the US government and operated by the US Air Force.

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BeiDou’s third and current network of 30 satellites was completed and began offering global services in July 2020, when Beijing and Washington were going through bitter “decoupling” and rising military tensions.

Apart from its military applications, the BeiDou system, with a 1.2m accuracy of positioning that surpasses the GPS’ 5-10m range, and added services such as text messaging, also aims to draw the global civilian satellite navigation market worth billions of US dollars.

Russia’s GLONASS, or Global Navigation Satellite System, started as a Soviet programme during the Cold War, and was restored in 2011. Now, with a constellation of 24 satellites in orbit, it has great advantages for military uses – thanks to its strong anti-jamming capability.

“BeiDou and GLONASS each have their own advantages. If they could be deeply linked or even interoperable, they could form an ideal navigation system, which would not only facilitate cross-border transport between the two sides in peacetime, but also improve the stability and survivability of the whole navigation system by relying on each other in wartime,” Chinese military expert Qian Liyan told Russia’s Sputnik news agency.

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In the 2018 deal, Beijing and Moscow also agreed to build ground monitoring stations for each other’s networks on home territory, which could help improve the networks’ global coverage and accuracy.

Operators in the two nations, the China Satellite Navigation System Committee and Russia’s State Space Corporation (Roscosmos), have over the past few years established a monitoring and evaluation service platform for both systems.

They have conducted phase 1 tests for providing joint services to Beijing’s multinational Belt and Road Initiative, and together developed satnav applications in cross-border transport and satnav chips, according to the Chinese committee.