India's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle placed a new navigation satellite into orbit late on Friday, in a mission intended to begin repairing a regional positioning system that has been running below the minimum needed to work.
GSLV-F18 lifted off from the second launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota and, about 18 minutes later, placed NVS-03 into its intended geosynchronous transfer orbit, the Indian Space Research Organisation said. The Hindu followed the launch through the night.
"The GSLV-F18 vehicle has successfully and precisely injected the NVS-03 satellite weighing 2250 kg in the intended elliptical orbit," the ISRO chairman, V. Narayanan, said. "Let me congratulate each and every team member of ISRO, industrial partners, academia for this outstanding accomplishment."
The satellite is equipped with an indigenous atomic clock alongside procured atomic clocks.
NavIC, India's regional navigation system, theoretically requires at least four satellites for its core services to function. Information shared by the Indian government indicates that only three of the constellation's eleven satellites are currently capable of performing their primary functions: the first-generation IRNSS-1B and IRNSS-1I, and the second-generation NVS-01.
Of those three, IRNSS-1B has already exceeded its designed ten-year lifespan, which makes its continued operation uncertain. IRNSS-1I could remain functional until around 2028. NVS-01, if it performs as intended, has at least another decade of service ahead of it.
NVS-02, launched in January 2025, was unable to raise its orbit after its onboard engines failed to fire, severely limiting its utility. NVS-01 is therefore the only satellite that can currently be considered reliably operational over the long term.
Restoring NavIC to minimum operational capacity would mean launching at least two more satellites, NVS-04 and NVS-05, alongside NVS-01 and NVS-03, and doing so within a relatively short period to ensure continuity. For stronger coverage and uninterrupted service, India would need a constellation of around six or seven.
The programme has moved in long intervals. NVS-01 launched in May 2023, NVS-02 in January 2025, and NVS-03 nearly twenty months after that. ISRO recorded three failures in six missions launched from Indian soil between January 2025 and January 2026. For comparison, 24 satellites are considered sufficient for global GPS coverage and the United States maintains at least 30; China's BeiDou is designed around 30, with an estimated 35 now in orbit.
It is worth being precise about what a three-satellite constellation can do. Satellite navigation works by comparing the time signals of several spacecraft at once. With three, a receiver can be told, to a very high standard of accuracy, when it is lost.
NVS-03 improves this considerably, and in a particular direction. It carries an indigenous atomic clock alongside procured atomic clocks, which means the satellite can now confirm the time against itself before offering any opinion about where anything is.
This newspaper regards it as the correct engineering priority. A constellation short of spacecraft has a position problem; it does not have a time problem. NavIC's new redundancy has accordingly been invested in the one quantity that does not require a second satellite to establish.
Our analysts note that the arrangement is also diplomatically neat. Should the indigenous clock and the procured clocks ever disagree, the question of which is right will be settled on board, in orbit, by the only parties present.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has asked what the system can guarantee in the meantime. The answer, pending NVS-04 and NVS-05, is the time, to a fraction that no road user has ever requested, from a satellite whose own orbit is still being raised.
Everything else is a question of position, and position needs four.