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Navigation Satellites Over Europe
Snags writes "It looks like Europe is getting its own equivalent to WAAS (a set of ground stations and geostationary satellites which relay information to help GPS accuracy in the US). The EGNOS system system is having a base station inaugurated in Langen, Germany this week. The system augments signals from GPS and Russia's Glonass to provide 2-meter accuracy in Europe. This is the first stage of the Galileo system reported earlier, and I'm sure these satellites and base stations will perform the same function once the Galileo constellation is flying."
Well a large part of my job is space-related (I'm a software engineer) and from what I have seen the three most important things are: * be good at your specialism * the ability to communicate with people that have a different specialism * the willingness to learn a bit of domain knowledge (e.g. physics) The fun thing about the space industry is that most people are highly motivated, and good at what they do - you won't last otherwise. Also, you cannot go far without at least an M.Sc. degree in this world. Although the economy is struggling a bit right now, people with truly good computer skills are rare, even in the space sector. I was pleaseantly surprised to find that I could really contribute something there. Despite its image, space is really a quite conservative business with regard to new technologies; the "proven technology" doctrine is quite strong for obvious reasons. New developments come by way of evolution rather that revolution, and you have to be able to work like that. The best way to get into space-related work is via the industry; many big companies have a space division where most of the actual work is done. The role for ESA is mostly setup and monitoring of projects; the big bucks (and therefore the most jobs) are with the companies that get the contracts. I don't know if the prime contractor(s) for GALILEO have already been established but that is probably where you should look.
One of the cleverest things the Galileo designers have come up with is to put their signal right in the middle of the US military GPS signal with an encrypted overlay. This means if in times of war the US tries to jam Galileo they jam their own military GPS and everyone is back to square one with civilian grade GPS which in any case everyone upto a Taxi driver has
**Life is too short to be serious**
Check it out: Terma; click on jobs.
US GPS and Russion GLONASS are operated by millitary. The Galileo project should assure Europe's indepenedence. Criticism and lobbying by US makes the project even more important. Galileo will send strong political message to US goverment.
Considerable industrial returns in manufacturing and services are expected as well. Besides free public accessible signal there will be commercial data stream modulated on basic signal. Users will pay for guaranteed availability and greater precision. AFAIK there should be also high precision signal available only to military and certain public authorities (regulation of air, sea and road transport comes to mind).
THigh lattitude (northern Europe) coverage of GPS isn't very good. By placing satellites in orbits at a greater inclination to the equatorial plane than GPS, Galileo will achieve better coverage at high latitudes.
One of the great improvements that WAAS offers over standard GPS is that it lets a user compute both a position and an error limit on that position. The position is guaranteed to be accurate within the error limit. Standard GPS gives you a position, but, can't "guarantee" that the position is correct. This is why the FAA doesn't allow standard GPS to be used as the primary navigation aid on an airplane during bad visibility conditions: there is no guarantee that the plane is going to find the runway where GPS says it is.
But when the FAA set the rules for determining how safe the error limit has to be, it pretty much guaranteed that the error limits broadcast by WAAS were going to be huge. (~30 meters) WAAS is way paranoid safe.
It will be interesting to see if EGNOS makes the same tradeoff between safety and usability that the WAAS system did. Maybe EGNOS will choose a less stringent safety requirement, and thus end up with smaller error limits.
Either way, both systems will probably have the same accuracy. (~1 meter)
The EU is planing a complete space program where Galileo is only a part of:l
http://europa.eu.int/comm/space/index_en.htm
A discussion all over Europa is just ongoing. Perhaps space exploration will be included in the constitution treaty of the EU which is just under negotiation.