Galileo satellites experience orbital injection anomaly on Soyuz launch
arianespace.com
arianespace.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smartphones_using_GLONA...
Also, does anyone know how much more accurate the positioning will be with the 3 systems combined? And whether phones will have access to regional systems like for Japan? The Wikipedia pages are enticing on these ideas, but I haven't seen most of it updated in a while.
> To improve development of the user segment, on August 11, 2010, Sergei Ivanov announced a plan to introduce a 25% import duty on all GPS-capable devices, including mobile phones, unless they are compatible with GLONASS. As well, the government is planning to force all car manufacturers in Russia to make cars with GLONASS starting from 2011. This will affect all car makers, including foreign brands like Ford and Toyota, which have car assembly facilities in Russia.[15]
It seems like a massively redundant waste of resources reinventing the wheel.
Military use makes sense for Russians. China is also building one.
I don't know what's the rationale for the European Space Agency. It's supposed to be a little better at higher latitudes.
And yes, this is also relevant for the military, Russia needs the ability to strike any adversary if they have to, as does the US and China.
No block is going to lower their guard (I'm not so sure, that the US wouldn't strike Russia right now if they could without being punished), so everyone is going to race to a first strike potential where they can't be punished by an adversary.
Once that point is reached by any side, nobody knows what will happen, which is obviously the reason, why Russia resisted the US missile defense in Poland.
We couldn't even tell what would happen, if all sides had friendly relations to each other. Someone will have the upper hand, therefore someone could be submitted. And I'm sure that none of those countries mentioned would accept submission.
I really don't think it's misplaced paranoia. Assume, hypothetically, that the Ukraine becomes a NATO member (they applied I heard) and that an attack on one triggers an attack on all and that it triggers world war three (I said hypothetical, right?), then I don't think America is going to let the Russians use GPS anymore.
And if it so happened that Europe decided that the Iraq and other middle east wars were kind of pointless and that Iran has not been developing nukes like America said they were over and over, and it ends up in war, I really doubt that we (Europeans) will get to share either the American's system.
World wars are maybe not that likely, I'm no expert, but in the case of some big war anywhere, I think the Americans would not hesitate to disable the public signal (there is already an encrypted GPS signal which is much more accurate) for a month or two and win the war because nobody can orient themselves anymore. Having a couple of system kind of makes sense.
Beidou (China), QZSS (Japan/Australia) and IRNASS (India) are all regional systems with far smaller systems (3+ satellites), and in the case of IRNASS and QZSS, heavily augmented by ground based stations (). Development of low cost RTK (real time kinematics), giving centimeter precision in some cases, has really been driven on a large scale by the Japanese. There is some great reading (and heavy math) on the RTKLIB site, http://www.rtklib.com/rtklib_document.htm, not only about RTK, but GNSS in general.
And things are going to get even more interesting with the data from the GRACE satellites, their gravity model will help improve position accuracy even further.
http://en.ria.ru/world/20140828/192413515/Galileo-Satellites...
If they do get them to a usable orbit, they won't have enough fuel to last long.
- There is no way for the satellites to reach the ISS - There is no way for the ISS or the crew to reach the satellites - The ISS does not carry equipment to refuel satellites - The satellites are not equiped to be refueled in space
etc...
Yes, it was "just a movie," but you know what? Reality is pretty goddamned interesting, too. Hollywood should try it sometime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)...
Note that the Galileo satellites orbit somewhere around 18000 miles higher than the ISS.
Moreover, if you have to carry fuel for somebody else it gets that much harder to accelerate/decelerate like that.
For a good intuitive idea of how hard that would be, I strongly recommend kerbal space program.
Anyway, the point being that I never would have understood any of this no matter how many times I read 2010, until I wrote that little game. Some things need to be experienced to really grok.
I gained a true appreciation for difficulty of the kind of maneuvers that are common place in science fiction after spending time with Orbiter.
I remember my friend telling me he actually googled down some US Space Shuttle maunals and used the real checklists when launching in the game.
This is a common misconception, however. For example, people want to know why Columbia didn't just buzz over and hook up with the ISS rather than burning up. They were at a different altitude from ISS and could not have made the jump with available fuel.
And due to the oddities of space travel, it costs a lot less delta-v to go from the Moon to Earth orbit than it does from Earth to Earth orbit, especially if you do aerobraking.
Isn't it? You drive, you burn fuel. You take more fuel with you, it costs more fuel to get going. Some vehicles (spacecraft or car) require more fuel to drive the same distance than others.
Sure, space flights are much, much more expensive, but I don't see how it's so different. If it's not worth it to spend the extra fuel to get there, refuel, and continue to the original destination, then just say so.
I'd refer you to the Rocket Equation [1].
In this situation, an on-orbit refueling capability and a tug, a ship which can pick things up and change their orbit, and refuel itself would be worth the cost of these satellites because it would take currently unusable satellites and turn them into usable ones. Not clear what the salvage rights in space are yet.
United Launch Associates (ULA) has some great work they have done on making a practical on-orbit refuelling capability but nobody has stepped up to pay for it. This is something I am hoping SpaceX will do. Elon is the type of person who might fund that on the expectation of making back the investment in saving satellites. [1]
[1] I would charge the satellite insurer 1/2 the value of the satellite to put it into its proper orbit. Which saves the insurer from paying out the full amount.
Frankly the new entrants into the remote sensing market (like Skybox) have yet to make much impact in changing the market. Having a more innovative platform makes little difference to the end user without significant scale (which is currently lacking).
1. Their orbital velocity must agree with the design criteria, so the Special Relativity adjustment in their clock rates will correspond to reality.
2. Their altitude must agree with the General Relativity adjustment made to their clocks, same reason.
If they end up at the wrong altitude, both their velocity and altitude are wrong, and all this deep thinking unravels (and it's not likely that this error can be adjusted for after a launch), as well as the fact that orbital erosion becomes a limiting factor in their lives.
...both satellites are in a safe state, correctly pointing to the sun, properly powered, and fully under control of the ESA-CNES integrated team...ESA teams are investigating the possibilities of exploiting the satellites to maximum advantage, despite their non-nominal injection orbits and within the limited propulsion capabilities. Different scenarios will then be assessed before decisions are taken for a recovery mission
TL;DR: Something got screwed up during the deployment of the satellites, they're in the wrong orbits but stable, no danger to public, no clue what got screwed up.
But ... that's what "anomaly" means -- a failure of unknown origin. It's just a concise way of saying it.
> Calling it an "anomaly" strongly implies that there was some sort of unexpected natural phenomena to blame ...
No, the word "anomaly", at least as used in space science, doesn't suggest that at all. In this context, anomaly means what idiopathic means in medicine -- an outcome of unknown origin.
No it doesn't. You should really look up the definition of the word, because you'll find it's being used correctly.
I can't resist adding that I've always described this quote in just this way (as do others), but it's never far from my mind that it relies on an English idiom, one in which "fix" has two meanings. It's not the same in Japanese.
They have alternatives with their own Ariane rocket and US rockets. Maybe its time they started not using the lowest bidder and went for quality instead. How many man hours were lost just now? Just incredible.
Also, I wouldn't put it past the Putin regime to do a black-ops on these Soyuz designs to weaken Galileo to give their GLONASS system a huge competitive advantage.
> Also, I wouldn't put it past the Putin regime to do a black-ops on these Soyuz designs to weaken Galileo to give their GLONASS system a huge competitive advantage.
I wouldn't put it past him anymore that I would put it past Obama. The US would have exactly the same reasons. Believe it or not, Putin is not some sort of evil monster from hell the western propaganda tries to paint him recently, and the US is not some white knight following superior morality. One could actually reasonably argue that the US is more evil than Russia on the international scale. Anyway, the most probable explanation is still "space is hard".
That argument only works because Russia is almost too small to matter.
Geography aside, were Russia really "almost too small to matter", it would have already been bombed by the US over Ukraine for some vague reason like "preventing evil regime from stopping people seeking true democracy".
If you take off the rose-colored, western-biased glasses, you'll see the US as a country that invades and destroys other nations for random made-up reasons like "they have WMDs!!!111oneoneone", that terrorizes innocent citizens of nuclear powers by constantly killing whole families at random by drone strikes, is probably single-handedly responsible for the rise of ISIS and basically looks like its trying to destabilize the whole world to fix its own economy.
So yes, I'll happily listen to USGov saying how Putin is evil, when they stop droning the living shit out of Pakistan.
Russia isn't very important in terms of its economy. Its GDP is ninth in the world[1], just behind Brazil and just ahead of Italy. Most of its GDP is from natural resources. If they didn't have oil and gas nobody would give a fuck about them.
Except for the elephant in the room. NUCLEAR WEAPONS. They have a very formidable arsenal. IMO that's the biggest reason that Ukraine isn't already part of NATO and why the West doesn't already have combat troops in Ukraine. Well, at least if Bush were President. I think Obama's foreign policy is a little bit more nuanced than Bush's was.
Vlad has recently [2] reminded us of his nuclear weapons.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nom... [2] http://news.yahoo.com/putin-says-russia-ready-respond-aggres...
I'm not claiming that they're not doing evil things, just that they're not the only ones, and if one starts arguing for possibility of them being so evil as to sabotage a civilian space missions, one would do well to consider other actors to which exactly the same arguments could apply.
I never said it wasn't, I was just exploring the possibility. My point is that a lot of international relations, and this includes spaceflight, works on trust. When one country is habitually lying to the world and receiving sanctions from its partners, that trust is lost. Especially since we know Russian leadership has no problem with politicizing space, namely, its sudden turn-about on RD-180 and early retirement of its part of the ISS. So we know they are willing to be petty in the world of spaceflight for completely unrelated reasons (Ukraine).
Thanks for the downvotes and putting words in my mouth though.
Well, the magnitude of this is still debatable, once you move outside the america-centric western propaganda bubble. But still, since we're comparing those two nations, I'd like to remind you that United States Government keeps lying to everyone 'both foreign and domestic', so we have exactly equal reasons to trust the US and the Russians.
Fortunately space is usually free of politics, but since you brought that up... did you know that it was NASA who first said (or likely was forced to) to Russians: "hey, we don't like what you're doing with Ukraine, so from now on, we're not going to space together"? The "sudden turn-about on" military engines and ISS prolongation on the part of Russians was merely a reaction to a completely asinine politicization of space by the US Government.
So to fix your sentence, what we know is that "the United States leadership has no problem with politicizing space".
But hell, of course it's the Russia's fault, Holy Freedom Loving America never does anything wrong, or stupid.
Disclaimer: I'm not pro-Russian. I'm anti-stupid-prowestern-propaganda and the usual assuming that America is Good, Russia is Bad. I think we're mature enough to not base our thinking on cold war-era action movies.
Edit: I should probably note, Delta II isn't completely retired yet. So the two are sorta kinda still tied. I've been a Delta II fan for a while, but they're down to selling off stockpiled hardware. Prices kinda went through the roof with the GPS contract going to EELVs. It's a shame, since it's the end of a fairly good track record. But we still have Soyuz.