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Comment by ahubert | Hacker News Reader

author here - if anyone has any questions or remarks, let me know!

Nice article! I used to work in this space (was formerly in charge of GNSS hardware at my company), and it's neat to see Galileo being put through its paces.

I see now that the US gets to take GPS (and the fact that the Air Force pretty much runs it single-handedly) for granted. We are seeing _some_ problems (like the GPS III block upgrade and OCX, ahah), but the org chart seems to be considerably simpler than what Galileo's got to deal with.

The operational and management aspects strike me as what happens when you have too many cooks in the kitchen - if everyone is responsible for everything, no one is responsible for anything

I gather the US GPS system has "Autonav mode" where each satellite has long-term ephemerides, allowing 60 days of reduced-precision operation if the ground segment fails. Does Galileo have no such thing, or had the errors propagated into such data by the time someone sounded the alarm?

The 60 day long-term ephemerides were the older sytem. Autonav on the current GPS satellites is considerably fancier - basically, the satellites carry out ranging measurements between each other and compute their own updated clock and ephemeris solutions on the satellites themselves in a distributed fashion. Specced to provide essentially full accuracy for something like six months, minus ionosphere estimates which can only be measured from the ground.

As far as I can tell, Galileo has nothing like this. They have a small buffer of future ephemeris data, but the ground segment failure here was so long that it completely ran out. Their approach seems to be full accuracy or why even bother.

Any chance we'll see WAAS reference stations with more autonomy for uploading ionsphere correction data directly to the constellation, instead of having to aggregate at master stations, which then forwards to ground uplinks?

Why would you want that? For slightly more accuracy in a severe ground station outage?

Seems only marginally worth it...

More redundancy, less single points of failure.

> As far as I can tell, Galileo has nothing like this. They have a small buffer of future ephemeris data, but the ground segment failure here was so long that it completely ran out. Their approach seems to be full accuracy or why even bother.

It's probably easier to say "our system being down won't be catastrophic" when it's one of 4+ systems rather than one of one, like GPS was.

Also probably not inaccurate to say that the US military cares more about what happens after the nukes start falling than the ESA does.

Hi makomk, (author here)

Indeed, Galileo has nothing like this. The GPS solution sounds exceptionally fancy, and it may go a long way to explaining where all those billions of USD/year go :-) Do you know if it has ever been tried for real? Thanks!

Doesn't sound that fancy... Orbital calculations are hard maths, but when you've written code to do it, that code can run anywhere, including on the satellite. Very little compute power is required.

Also, satellites are in direct view of one another and can easily receive each others signals. A rather simple software radio could receive the signals from a basic omnidirectional antenna. The only challenge is subtracting out the very strong local signal before digitising, but considering the very strong coding gain in GPS, it should be doable.

> A rather simple software radio

I'd think that would be rather a phase accurate software radio.

Aren't all software radios phase accurate...?

I mean the system was designed as a military tool, with the primary scenario of surviveability being nuclear war, so the level of redundancy seen makes sense to me.

I'm not actually sure if it's been used for real, and I don't think it's really been needed - apparently it's rare for GPS ephemeris data uploads to be late by even an hour or two. In principle the idea is that it would be operating all the time and give slight accuracy and integrity monitoring improvements, but that doesn't seem to be a priority.

Incidentally, it seems like the EU is looking at developing their own version of Autonav for the next generation of Galileo, quite possibly with optical rather than radio links between the satellites.

No question, but thanks for the research and article!

thanks!

Thanks for writing this.

The title doesn't mention that Galileo is a Global Navigation System (GPS).

GPS refers specifically to the US system.

Indeed, the second paragraph spells out that this is a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and places it in context with GPS, GLONASS, and BeiDou

Unfortunately, anyone who knows what the acronym GNSS stands for probably also already knows Galileo is such a system. So changing the title to 'Galileo GNSS outage' probably wouldn't clarify matters :(

"Galileo" can stand for a lot of things.

Which is funny, because I've heard it both ways.

For a while, as new systems were coming online, GPS was being used as a generic term, and the US system was being referred to by its original name, NAVSTAR.

But only purists would do that, and everyone else kept saying GPS to refer to the US system, so the new term GNSS was invented as the generic.

I try to say NAVSTAR and GNSS to avoid the ambiguous GPS, just like I say "gridiron" and "soccer" to avoid "football".

But only purists would do that

Perhaps the same sort of space nerds who still call Dish Network "Echostar."

/Waves hand.

Or track the ISS as Zarya.

/waves a trusty Omnipoint phone

That's because Galileo is a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS).

Saying Galileo is a GPS is like saying Target is a Walmart.

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