Launch of India's First Navigation Satellite Successful

An anonymous reader writes "India's first dedicated navigation satellite, the IRNSS-1A, developed by the Indian Space Research Organization, was successfully put in orbit on Monday night. The launch vehicle, PSLV-C22, bearing the 1,425-kg navigation satellite, blasted off the launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Center here at the scheduled lift-off time of 11.41 p.m." The satellite is the first of seven that will eventually provide a regional equivalent of GPS under complete Indian control.

Comments

Out of curiosity...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Is India's space navigation system sufficiently similar(in terms of frequencies, antenna demands, etc.) that it will be relatively easy to shoehorn into navigation chipsets along with GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo, or is it enough of an oddball in some way, either technologically or administratively(a more hardass version of the old GPS civilian precision reduction that the US used to use or occassionally threaten to use), that this is basically irrelevant for everybody who isn't Indian military?

Re:Out of curiosity...

[rubycodez]

we'll have to call their tech support and get a reading from a script to find out

Re:Out of curiosity...

[Capt James McCarthy]

we'll have to call their tech support and get a reading from a script to find out

But when you call, you get someone in Texas.

Re:Out of curiosity...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

We do have some deep-cover operatives working in Texas(as with other authoritarian petro-theocracies, it pays to keep an eye on them); but if somebody tells you that they are "an American from Texas", they are probably telling one of the inside jokes that they use on foreigners. Texas has texans which are a totally different thing.

Re:Congrats

[ArcadeMan]

Yesterday, I read about a failed launch from Russia.
Today, I read about a successful launch from India.

I'm sure there's a "in Soviet Russia" mixed in with an "India tech support" joke in there somewhere.

This week so far:

[Black Parrot]

India 1, Russia 0.

So far, it sucks.

[localman57]

I am one of the early beta testers for this project. The satellite went live a few hours ago. And as far as I can tell, it's far, far inferior to the US GPS system. With GPS, I get very accurate longitude and latitude, and coarse altitude location information. All the INRSS system keeps telling me is :

You are somewhere on the surface of a sphere 20121.2km from satellite #1

Although they've promised a firmware upgrade that will show you as being somewhere on the circle that represents the intersection of that sphere and the Earth's surface.

Re:So far, it sucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not three, preferably four. It is four.

One tells you a circular line on the globe where you could be at any place on that line.
Two tells you two intersections of that line you could be.
Three tells you either one of the two points where you are located within a margin, or what altitude you are within a margin.
The fourth one is to determine which of the two points you are located, your altitude, and gives significant increase in accuracy by providing overlapping spatial and temporal data.

It may appear that three is enough as most receivers have a rudimentary altimeter based on pressure. Even in such cases, the accuracy is very poor and reasonable navigation requires computation of previous known points along with your estimated speed and direction. It is better than doing it by hand (unless you have a compass and know how to use it), but not by much.