
Galileo satellites experience orbital injection anomaly on Soyuz launch - gurupradhan
http://www.arianespace.com/news-press-release/2014/8-23-2014.asp
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jessriedel
I've heard that eventually most GPS devices, like phones, will be able to also
use Galileo and GLONASS (the Russian satellite navigation system). Does anyone
know the status of that? There's a list on Wikipedia of GLONASS-compatible
phones, but it's not clear if the typical American phone can actually use it.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smartphones_using_GLONA...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smartphones_using_GLONASS_Navigation#Samsung)

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.

~~~
ForHackernews
Why are so many countries/regions building their own positioning systems? Is
it just national pride? Paranoia about being denied military use of GPS?

It seems like a massively redundant waste of resources reinventing the wheel.

~~~
Retric
Japan is covered by a single orbit and there system provides significantly
higher accuracy (cm vs meter) than GPS so for the fairly low price tag for
seven satilites it's probably worth it.

~~~
Rexxar
QZSS (the Japanese GPS) is not autonomous. It uses GPS and use the additional
satellite to improve precision. (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-
Zenith_Satellite_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-
Zenith_Satellite_System) and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNSS_augmentation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNSS_augmentation))

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robszumski
This source seems to indicate that it was a software error that guided the
stage into the wrong orbit.

[http://en.ria.ru/world/20140828/192413515/Galileo-
Satellites...](http://en.ria.ru/world/20140828/192413515/Galileo-Satellites-
Incident-Likely-Result-of-Software-Errors.html)

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huhtenberg
How big this orbit difference is? Would adjusting the orbit be an option at
all? Does anyone know? Just curious.

~~~
JshWright
The 5 degree inclination change would likely burn through most, if not all, of
the maneuvering fuel onboard the satellites. That's not accounting for the
peri/apoapsis adjustments.

If they do get them to a usable orbit, they won't have enough fuel to last
long.

~~~
lucb1e
And refueling is not an option? There are also people on the ISS for example,
when the crew refreshes they could do that "on the way there"... yeah I don't
know anything about space, just an idea.

~~~
twistedpair
How? Space is not like driving a car. To go higher you've got to burn fuel to
gain velocity and altitude, do go lower you've got to burn fuel to slow down.
If you're going the wrong direction or angle, you've got to burn a ton of fuel
to change that (i.e. if at 90deg to ISS, you've got no velocity vector in
common). And that's just my armchair assessment that ignores the myriad
complications of spaceflight.

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.

~~~
lucb1e
> How? Space is not like driving a car.

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.

~~~
twistedpair
> Isn't it. You drive, you burn fuel.

I'd refer you to the Rocket Equation [1].

1\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation)

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SEJeff
And this is why microsats make a ton of sense. Google did the right thing in
buying Skybox. Instead of 3-4 beastly (and expensive) sats, send up a dozen
much smaller ones and have them use software smarts to talk to eachother. I
think that is a much more viable approach longer term for anything such as
this in space.

~~~
7952
How exactly could you divide a GNSS satellite in that way? Surely you need to
transmit the time signal at a particular power level that would required a
certain class of antenna and power system. Each of those satellites would need
separate control systems so instead of having one fuel tank and thruster you
would need several fuel tanks and thrusters.

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).

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gambiting
Could they not just stay in this orbit and still provide a useful service?
Hopefully it's not like they are completely useless now?

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yaur
This based on ksp knowledge, so take it with a grain of salt. Typically when
you launch a constellation of satellites you want them to all have the same
SMA so that they have the same period. Since this one is significantly off
it's going to drift relative to the rest of the constellation and isn't likely
to provide a useful signal.

~~~
gambiting
Yeah I am just wondering if there is any way this can be compensated for in
software, either in the receivers or in the satellite itself.

~~~
lutusp
The problem is more severe than it may seem. Satellites in the wrong orbit
tend to fall to earth sooner (higher partial pressure at lower altitudes).
Also, because of the satellites' purpose, they have to reach their design
altitude to be of any use at all, for two reasons:

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.

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orclev
This seems like a nearly content free article. Aside from the planned and
actual orbits and the dates involved there doesn't seem to be much actual
information here.

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.

~~~
john_b
It's a press release, not a post-mortem. Its only purpose is to inform the
public of what they know with confidence.

~~~
revelation
While dispelling any possible notion of "blame" or "responsibility". Instead,
some out-of-this-world power caused the satellites to "experience" an "orbital
injection anomaly".

~~~
orclev
I think that's the part that annoyed me most about the whole thing. It's
pretty obvious someone screwed up somewhere even if we don't know exactly
where yet. Whitewashing the whole thing by saying there was an "anomaly"
during deployment seems pretty weak. I would rather they be more upfront about
it and say there was a failure of unknown origin that they're still
investigating. Calling it an "anomaly" strongly implies that there was some
sort of unexpected natural phenomena to blame, which although that _might_ be
the case is so incredibly unlikely as to not even be worth considering.

~~~
TeMPOraL
No, it's just the normal language you use for those things. Anomaly means
exactly "the failure of unknown origin".

~~~
dnautics
Anomaly means an event (failure, in this case) that should be expected only
once given a relatively large number of repetitions. To brand it an anomaly
does indeed act to dispel notions of poor design because the suggested
assumption that goes into it is that if they repeated the launch everything
would be hunky dory, which would not be the case if there is a design flaw.

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drzaiusapelord
Why is the ESA still using Russian rockets? After the recent showing of the
Russian Proton-M blowing up all the time (including taking out Europe's AM4R
sat) its asinine they keep using Russian designs to do this.

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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
You're forgetting that it's Russian rockets that constantly refuel and
resupply ISS, without any problems. It's just a selection bias.

> _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".

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>. Anyway, the most probable explanation is still "space is hard".

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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _When one country is habitually lying to the world and receiving sanctions
> from its partners, that trust is lost._

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.

