On Tuesday night Russia sent three new satellites into space, in a move that aims to extend the country’s own version of the United States’ Global Position System (GPS) to the whole Russian territory.

According to Russia’s Federal Space Agency’s spokesman Alexander Vorobyov, the three satellites were launched into orbit on a Proton-M rocket and they will join the country’s Global Navigation Satellite System, or GLONASS. The Proton-M rocket was blasted off from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 2:32 p.m. EST.

Russia’s Global Navigation Satellite System serves both civilian and military purposes and its development has started since Soviet times, when it was supposed to have 24 satellites. After the 1991 Soviet collapse, the country’s number of satellites steadily decreased. Recently Russia’s government has started trying to revive it by earmarking funds from windfall oil revenues.

According to Sergei Ivanov, the First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, the Tuesday launch would bring the GLONASS satellite fleet to 18, which is also the necessary number of satellites to provide navigation services over the whole Russian territory. Ivanov said that the system would become available worldwide by 2010, when his country will have no less than 24 satellites into orbit.

Europe is also currently developing its own satellite navigation system, called Galileo.