MOSCOW. Dec 7 (Interfax) - The Russian Prosecutor General's Office will investigate the legality of budget spending for the GLONASS project.
"The Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, acting on orders given by President Dmitry Medvedev, has formed a working group to look into the legality of using the money allocated for the creation of the GLONASS navigation satellite system," Prosecutor General's Office spokeswoman Marina Gridneva told Interfax on Tuesday.
Appropriate inquiries will be conducted in the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and all of the organizations involved in building the launch vehicle and satellites for the GLONASS project, Gridneva said.
"The legality of the Federal Space Agency's management of funds as part of the Global Navigation Satellite System federal project will be checked. Prosecutors will also carry out inquiries in all of the organizations that helped make the Proton-M launch vehicle and the GLONASS satellites. The Prosecutor's Office of the Baikonur Cosmodrome will also investigate whether or not the organizations based on its premises obeyed the law," the spokeswoman said.
The group set up by the Prosecutor General's Office will work together with the government's commission to investigate the technical and other circumstances surrounding the December 5 accident when Russia's Proton-M launch vehicle and three navigation satellites it was carrying crashed into the Pacific Ocean 1,500 kilometers off Honolulu, she said.
The Energia Aerospace Corporation has confirmed that three GLONASS satellites that were part of a failed launch on Sunday crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
"The incorrect operation of the Proton rocket brought the booster unit and three Glonass-M satellites to an erroneous trajectory, and the satellites sank in the Pacific Ocean, 1,500 kilometers northwest of Honolulu, the administrative center of the U.S. state of Hawaii," Energia said in a statement received by Interfax-AVN.
Investigators have blamed the possible excess weight of the DM-03 upper stage for the December 5 accident, a source in the space rocket industry told Interfax-AVN on Tuesday.
"There is a theory that at the Baikonur cosmodrome the DM-03 upper stage was filled up with one tonne of fuel more than it was necessary," the source said.
This very well explains specialists' telemetric data, according to which the actual speed of the Proton-M was approximately 100 meters per second slower than its calculated speed when the upper stage with the Glonass-M satellites separated from the rocket, he said.
"Specialists have simulation where the upper stage weighed one tonne more, which resulted in a disaster similar to what happened last Sunday," the source said.