Another attempt will be made on Friday to launch the first satellites for Galileo - Europe's version of GPS. The two spacecraft are set to ride into orbit atop a Russian Soyuz rocket from Sinnamary in French Guiana. They should have left Earth on Thursday but the launch countdown was halted when a valve on pipes feeding propellant to the Soyuz' third stage was found to be leaking. Engineers replaced the valve, keeping the delay to just 24 hours. The new launch time has been scheduled for 07:30 local time (10:30 GMT; 11:30 BST). The mission will be the first for Soyuz in French Guiana. The rocket normally flies from northern Russia, and from Kazakhstan - the famous Baikonur Cosmodrome. A new, half-a-billion-euro launch complex has been constructed for the rocket in the South American jungle, about 10km up the coast from the launch pad of Europe's Ariane vehicles. By launching closer to the equator than its traditional bases, the Soyuz can get a bigger boost from the Earth's rotation, meaning it can put heavier payloads in orbit. Long programme The launch, when it does happen, will see the two satellites placed in a 23,222km-high orbit. A full rollout to incorporate some 30 satellites will probably take most of the decade and cost European taxpayers well in excess of 5bn euros. Compared with the Americans' current version of GPS, Galileo carries more precise atomic clocks - the heart of any sat-nav system. In theory, the data transmitted by Galileo should therefore be significantly better than its US counterpart. Whereas a position fixed by the publicly available GPS signal might have an error of about 10m, Galileo's errors should be on the scale of a metre or so. But the plan is to make both systems interoperable, meaning the biggest, most obvious benefit to users will simply be the fact that they can see more satellites in the sky. So, as the decade progresses and the number of spacecraft in orbit increases, the performance of all sat-nav devices should improve. Fixes ought to be faster and more reliable, even in testing environments such as big cities where tall buildings will often obscure a receiver's view of the transmitting spacecraft. Few people perhaps recognise the full extent of GPS usage today. Sat-nav is not just about drivers trying to find their way on unfamiliar roads - banks employ GPS time to stamp global financial transactions; and telecommunications and computer networks are synchronised on the "ticks" of the satellites' atomic clocks. Galileo should have been operational by now but the project has run into myriad technical, commercial and political obstacles. Its biggest crisis occurred in 2007 when the public-private partnership set up to build and run the system collapsed. The project was very nearly abandoned at that point. The two satellites set for launch on Friday were manufactured by a consortium led by Astrium, Europe's largest space company. Source:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15372540
How, nice, something from Europe, at last....... Now.. if it would help my own Garmin......... That would be very nice indeed....
The Galileo system will be interoperable with the existing GPS satellites but I expect for new devices that can take advantage of it the more accurate time signal will be a big boost. So your Garmin will probably benefit Dom, actually they really need to get more satellites up there because the existing network has had a lot of failures and is borderline functional at the moment. This will be Europe coming to the rescue of the US even though the American's were not at all happy about the Galileo system.
