ST. PETERSBURG, May 23. /TASS/. The research station Russkaya, in western Antarctica, on the coast of Marie Byrd Land, mothballed in 1990, will be recommissioned in 2021, for which purpose the Russian Antarctic Expedition will be granted about 300 million rubles ($4.6 million) of budget money, the deputy director of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute under the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexander Klepikov, told TASS on Thursday.

"The Russkaya Station is to be reopened in 2021. The Russian Antarctic Expedition has obtained about 300 million rubles for the purpose. The decision to reopen the station was made mostly at the initiative of the space corporation Roscosmos, which is heavily involved in all of our projects, except for the station Vostok. It plants equipment for the GLONASS system and the system of tracking spacecraft. The company needs the location of the Russkaya Station," he said.

The station was set up in the 1970s. Starting from 1980 it operated as a seasonal field base. Budget constraints forced its suspension in 1990.

For a long time the Russian Antarctic Expedition pressed for its reactivation. A group of researchers visited it in 2008 to install distance monitoring equipment.