Galileo

Doghead · Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 4:59 am Post subject: Galileo

Just a few interesting articles about Galileo, which the EU is developing as an alternative to the United States' Global Positioning System (GPS).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3121682.stm

BBC also has a back catalogue of link articles on Galileo from the page above.

Galileo may already be well known about here, but ran a search and no results shown.

Galileo is quite some way off becoming a reality, but at one point it looked like never getting past the political stage, and now has become quite a serious project.

Galileo will consist of 30 sats.

Unlike GPS and Russia's Glonass, which are military-run network and can be downgraded or taken offline, Galileo will be a civilian-run operation that will be guarantee the operations of services - unless there is some absolute emergency which requires them to be downgraded/offline.

Apparently more accurate than GPS - especially in Europe.

One interesting stat:
Why have Galileo?
Expected to be more than 400 million sat-nav users by 2015

Doghead · Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 7:06 am Post subject:

btw - Another big Galileo story happening today, i didn't when making the post above.

Another Galileo - not connected to the EU Galileo project - the US Galileo space probe which is due to plunge in to the atmosphere of Jupiter, suffering total destruction, later today.

This Galileo had a good run, travelling three billion miles since its launch in 14 years of exploration.

Dave · Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 8:42 am Post subject:

Galileo is part of the European version of WAAS dogged EGNOS and run by the European Space Agency. It's been running for over a year, but hasn't gone public yet, in years to come it will supplement the current American GPS system which hasn't been maintained very well in recent years and should take us forward into better GPS systems in years to come.

Doghead · Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 11:08 am Post subject:

Excellent.

I read a report on the forum earlier this year about the deteriorating state of a few of the US satellites, so good to know that the US GPS will eventually be supplemented by this new EU satellite project.

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