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"Pathfinders" Take Shape For Galileo, Europe's GPS
oliderid sends along a BBC report on progress toward Europe's home-grown GPS system. The Galileo concept will get an initial test via four "pathfinder" satellites that will be the first in the Galileo constellation. Galileo is intended to be complementary with the US GPS system — when all 30 Galileo birds are flying, a receiver with both GS and Galileo capability should enjoy 1-meter positional accuracy, vs. the several meters available through GPS alone, according to the article. There's a video tour of the facility where the pathfinders are being built. "After all the wrangling, the delays, and the furor over cost, Europe's version of GPS is finally starting to take shape. Due for launch in pairs in late 2010 and early 2011, the 'pathfinders' will form a mini-constellation in the sky. They will transmit the navigation signals that demonstrate the European system can become a reality."
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How are they getting funding? As recently as yesterday I was reading about how it was pretty much an orphaned project because no one wanted to buy what was already available for free (albeit less reliably). I skimmed TFA and found nothing on the matter. No matter how they funded it (unless they sold some babies or something), I'm glad they are moving forward on this. I see this as being really good for Europe, and the space industry in general.
What I think is really cool about GPS is that without Einstein's theory of general relativity, it wouldn't work. For example, the atomic clocks aboard the satellites run faster because they're higher up in the Earth's gravitational field, and when you're higher in a gravitational field, time flows more quickly. If they didn't compensate for this effect (and a bunch of others), the system wouldn't work at all. Of course you can still find kooks on the internet who think that relativity is all wrong, and have mathematical proofs to that effect. I wonder if those people refrain from using GPS?
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GPS is so standard now, and it is bugfree. It's hard to imagine anyone switching.
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I'd like to buy a NTP appliance that averages together GPS/Navistar, Galileo, and GLONASS for reliability/precision reasons.
I know I can buy GPS based NTP appliances off the shelf for years (decades?), but I'm interested in combined devices.
Obviously Galileo based systems are only vaporware at this time, but someone must have announced something by now?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
They are getting funding from the government.
1) They want to track all vehicles in the EU. Galileo is designed to have much better performance in urban areas than GPS.
Proposals were on the UK Department for Transport website which detailed the desire to place a satellite positioning tracker with a cellular modem in every vehicle, by law, for the alleged purpose of "road pricing" ; charging for transit on key congested roads at certain times. Road pricing is horseshit because if having to drive on a congested road isn't sufficient deterrent to stop you doing it, then taxation isn't going to achieve it. You could also achieve the same goal much more cheaply with a mandatory active RFID numberplate and a pickup loop on these "key" roads, so Occams razor says that they want something that doesn't just track your use of certain roads.
2) Military reasons
Let's face it. Would you want your military dependant on a system that a culture of well known isolationists who live half a world away can switch off at their whim? Neither would I. Independance from US control is the second motivator.
I thought Pathfinder was the project to establish a communications link with Voyager.
Seeing as civilian technologies have been demonstrated to get around the artificial limitation in the accuracy of GPS wouldn't it make more sense for the U.S. military to just allow access to the full precision signal to civilians?
Why, from "unspent agricultural subsidies", of course.
http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/3994
Wow, thanks! And I thought it would be pretty funny, to see a couple of satellites in 17th century clothes, float trough space... )
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I agree that mass vehicle tracking raises very serious privacy concerns, but road pricing does reduce traffic. You might be interested in the Transport For London annual report, which indicates that traffic in the city is about 20% lower than it otherwise would be.
The trouble with your proposal to just track "key" roads is that it encourages traffic to do rat-runs along secondary roads. I experienced this personally when tolling was brought in on a freeway near my house; the alternative routes were suddenly jam-packed with traffic, particularly at off-peak times when they were previously quiet.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
This is good. High-precision GPS, which requires seeing 5 or more satellites, is intermittent in urban canyon situations. With the ability to use GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo signals, the odds of having five sats high in your local sky improve substantially. The high-precision (15cm) receivers will be less flakey.
Even after Gravity Probe B, some issues remain, and ESA is planning to send to space the ACES clocks to settle of some long-standing debates.
That's really not how selective availability works. You can't just enable SA for certain people - it's either on (in which case nobody but those with the encryption keys gets it, which would black out high precision GPS for all commercial receivers, world wide), or it's off (in which case everyone gets the unencrypted signal). You can't just punish individual countries.
And it's moot anyway, as many of the satellites currently orbiting, and all the new ones, don't even include the feature. I doubt it's even possible to turn on SA at this point.