American GPS gets more competition as Europe launches 2nd navigation test satellite
April 28, 2008
EU’s Galileo project moves forward with second navigation satellite; 30 global positioning satellites planned by 2013 to combat US GPS dominance in Europe
Around two and a half years after the European Union launched its first test satellite in the field of global navigation, a second experimental satellite for the EU’s Galileo project was launched early Sunday. The European project, which has suffered delays since its inception in 2005, is meant to compete with the US’s Global Positioning System (GPS), which is widely used in satellite navigation devices in both motor vehicles and boats, not only in the US but all over the world. Visitors to France would have seen US-built GPS systems in Paris taxicabs as early as 2002. The European Parliament finally gave approval on Wednesday to the sweeping EU Galileo project, in the hopes it will combat US dominance in the field.
The new European satellite, a 500-kilogram cube builts by the private companies Astrium and Thales Alenia Space, is to take over from the first test satellite Giove-A, launched in December 2005. Astrium and Thales Alenia Space were originally part of a provate consortium that had planned to finance the project, but the consortium pulled out, leaving the EU to pay for Galileo and the two companies to produce it.
The Soyuz rocket bearing the Giove-B satellite lifted off as planned on Saturday night at 10:16 PM GMT local time from Baïkonour, in Kazakhstan. Four hours later, at 2:16 a.m the Giove-B satellite was successfully placed in orbit, specified the European Space Agency and Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of Starstem, the Russo-European company in charge of the launch. “The satellite separated” from the launcher, making the launch a success, Le Gall said. The satellite then “reached its nominal orbit and the orbit’s parameters were excellent,” the navigation department chief of the ESA Didier Faivre said.
The Giove-B satellite has two solar panels, each about 14 feet long, that will contirubte power to the satellite. Giove-B correctly deployed its solar panels, Faivre said.
The EU navigational satellite also has an atomic clock which loses less than a nanosecond a day. The clock is the most precise on Earth but never before sent into space. Such precision is vital for the global positioning technology, based on calculating time elapsed between the emission and signal reception.
The EU Galileo network when completed will comprise on the whole 30 navigational satellites, covering a grid of the Earth’s total surface, in permanent orbit at an altitude of 12,400 miles from Earth. The entire project, estimated at 2.2 billion euros (and up to 3.4 billion by some estimates), is being entirely financed by the European Union after the withdrawal of a private consortium. The project has six segments — satellites, launchers, computer programmes, ground stations, control stations and system operation.
The first four of the 30 non-experimental Galileo satellites are to go into space in the first quarter of 2010, using the Russian-developed Soyuz rocket, as did Saturday’s launch.
Europe’s Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot, in an interview in France with French Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, called Galileo “a tool of sovereignty for Europe.” He said that with global positioning becoming more and more prominent, Europe should not rely for its global positioning needs on one single system like GPS, especially since it is an American one. The launch of Giove-B would allow Europe access to a frequency reserved exclusively for Galileo with the International Telecommunications Union (UIT).
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