Russian Proton-M carrier rocket has successfully put into orbit a military satellite following the launch from the Baikonur space center, the Defense Ministry press service said Sunday.

"The satellite, launched in the interests of the Russian Defense Ministry at 03:19 a.m. [Moscow time, 00:19 GMT] on December 13 on the Proton-M carrier rocket from the Baikonur space center, is operated by the Main Test Space Center named after German Titov of the Aerospace Forces," the ministry said.

According to the ministry, the launch of the carrier rocket and putting the satellite into orbit were carried out on schedule.

A Proton-M rocket blasted off from Site 81/24 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Sunday at 0:19 UTC embarking on a classified mission to deliver the Garpun No. 2 military communications satellite to Geostationary Orbit in a mission lasting approximately nine hours. Tasked with the relay of data to and from low-orbiting satellites, the Garpun spacecraft will take up station in Geostationary Orbit, 36,000 Kilometers above Earth to enable the real time downlink of images and other data from Russia’s military satellite fleet including low-orbiting reconnaissance craft, Spaceflight101 portal reported.

The launch of the heavy-lift Proton rocket was originally scheduled for December 10, but was pushed three days for additional reviews, reportedly associated with the spacecraft separation system following the separation failure of Russia’s Kanopus ST remote sensing / submarine-tracking satellite last week leading to an untimely demise of the satellite in an uncontrolled re-entry. This marked the second separation failure of the year after the botched launch of Progress M-27M in April that also hit trouble at the time of spacecraft separation, therefore it is understandable that teams decided to proceed with caution and conduct additional reviews.