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Galileo Satellites Are Experiencing Multiple Clock Failures (bbc.com)
elgatozorbas writes: According to a BBC article, the onboard atomic clocks that drive the satellite-navigation signals on Europe's Galileo network have been failing at an alarming rate. From the report: "Across the 18 satellites now in orbit, nine clocks have stopped operating. Three are traditional rubidium devices; six are the more precise hydrogen maser instruments that were designed to give Galileo superior performance to the American GPS network. Each Galileo satellite carries two rubidium and two hydrogen maser clocks. The multiple installation enables a satellite to keep working after an initial failure. All 18 spacecraft currently in space continue to operate, but one of them is now down to just two clocks. Most of the maser failures (5) have occurred on the satellites that were originally sent into orbit to validate the system, whereas all three rubidium stoppages are on the spacecraft that were subsequently launched to fill out the network. Esa staff at its technical centre, ESTEC, in the Netherlands are trying to isolate the cause the of failures - with the assistance of the clock (Spectratime of Switzerland) and satellite manufacturers (Airbus and Thales Alenia Space; OHB and SSTL). It is understood engineers have managed to restart another hydrogen clock that had stopped. It appears the rubidium failures 'all seem to have a consistent signature, linked to probable short circuits, and possibly a particular test procedure performed on the ground.'"
The satellites have backup clocks for the very reason that something like this would happen. It just wasn't expected to happen on this scale, but despite that all satellites apparently have at least one rubidium and one hydrogen clock running. They have successfully gotten one hydrogen clock that wasn't running to run again, and there is apparently no reason to expect either way that the other clocks will or will not get restarted. Somebody in earlier comments mentioned a test that was run that may have induced the failure, so it is a bad test. Add it to the things to not do in the future. But the article seemed a bit light on what the things that can be done are, or what got that one clock working.
Long ago when my company looked into this, the problem was finding manufacturing facilities that had procedures for it.
Well I couldn't help thinking about the Iranian civilian program and the 'alarming rate of failure' of their centrifuges.
Are the contractors who worked on Galileo going to discover some kind of Stuxnet variant on their network?
Technically, it's possible. Thanks to work of security researchers we know it happened before, Stuxnet is well-documented. And thanks to Edward Snowden and the journalists who reported on the documents he leaked, we know the NSA/TAO does in fact hack allies.
I wish these kind of doubts could be instantly discarded as conspiracy theories, unfortunately, this is not the world we live in. The most technically capable nations (USA/China/Russia/Isreal) have made the choice of using hacking as a weapon rather than helping secure the systems used by their citizens.
Where is your vaunted aryan science, naziboys? Hmmm?
At NASA. They were very eager to have it.
Sometimes it's good to get the news later to let the facts reveal themselves. Not everything needs to be tied to the '24 hour immediate news' cycle.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The proof that these clock failures aren't the result of some CIA meddling is that they haven't had any actual impact. A foreign government would want to take enough of these clocks offline to make the constellation fail, and they would want to make this happen at a time of their choosing. Ho do a few sporadic clock failures, some of which have already been fixed, benefit anyone?
I was just reading some posts from a guy whose job is building electronics which operate in a vacuum. As in, that's what he does all day. His first #1 tip for building electronics to be used in a vacuum is ...
1) Don't use lead-free solder. Vacuum promotes the growth of whiskers, so lead-free solder always ended up with whiskers for us.
I'll take it from the person who does this for a living.