"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."

Comments

Re:Funding

[Anonymous Coward]

(unless they sold some babies or something)

Don't be so narrow minded. Music industry execs have to eat something.

general relativity at work

[bcrowell]

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?

Re:general relativity at work

[dkf]

I'm struggling to think of a positioning system design that would require GR/SR to work rather than time of flight... I think it would have to be an active transponder system, or some kind of weird gravity wave detector? It would be interesting.

If we ever need accurate positioning around a black hole, we can at least know that slashdot will be able to tell us how!

And people call us useless! Hah!

Re:Funding

[Zoxed]

> 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 can not remember the full story, but the industry funding arguments dragged along for years, and in the end the EU took over funding of the project (it was too high profile to fail !!).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)

Re:Funding

[Ethanol-fueled]

Also, China and Russia have plans to develop their own GPS systems as well. This indicates that there is plenty of squabbling behind the scenes.

Re:The EU system won't get used

[Anonymous Coward]

GPS is so standard now, and it is bugfree. It's hard to imagine anyone switching.

Yeah, "complementary" is a long word, isn't it? I wonder what it means.

EU Vehicle Tracking Plan

[Dr_Barnowl]

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.

Re:EU Vehicle Tracking Plan

[thogard]

SA was a hack on the early systems and the newest sats don't have that ability at all. The SA adjuster on older sats is a motor driven thing and it has been broken on several sats since before SA was turned off. The new sats have spot beams which can be used to turn off GPS (and may have the ability to introduce random jitter in the outbound signals) in part of the world but the USAF has local GPS jamming that works far better. The problem with turning on SA or blocking GPS in a local area is that having GPS work properly is more useful than having it broken since the US is in a better position to use the technology in a hostile location than the locals are at using it to fight back.

Re:Funding

[mirix]

No, it covers almost all of earth. A few years ago you would be more correct though.

It's short a few satellites for whole world coverage right now. Now that Russia has oil dollars running in, the whole world should be back up in a year or so... they've been launching satellites quite frequently the last few years.

Here is a map of current coverage.. basically everywhere except Antarctica.
map A few pieces are missing here and there, but it's a far cry from "just russia".

Road pricing is not "horseshit"

[Goonie]

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.

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.