Two Galileo satellites ready to go

Two more route and timing shuttle are because of dispatch on a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana. Their fruitful situation in circle will bring the quantity of satellites in the group of stars to 10 - 33% of the path to a system of 30 stages. Lift-off is set for 23:08 neighborhood time (02:08 GMT). The shuttle ought to partitioned from the rocket's upper-arrange a little more than three-and-a-half hours after the fact. Galileo is a task of the European Commission, the EU's official branch. It is intended to supplement the American Global Positioning System (GPS), while in the meantime presenting additional exactness for clients. Albeit committed administrations in view of the European system won't be made accessible until no less than 14 operational satellites are in circle, the signs from each new expansion in the sky can be abused by getting gadgets with perfect chipsets. "There are various chipsets that have been created and are in the business sector conveyed in cell phones and route hardware for autos, for occurrence," clarified Javier Benedicto, the Galileo program administrator at the European Space Agency (Esa is the EC's obtainment specialists). 

"Those chipsets are as of now ready to consolidate the Galileo 

signals with the GPS signals. That changes over into a change of the route's accessibility administration which is experienced by GPS clients today."The development path to a "European GPS" has been a tortuous one. The project is years late, and the completion cost - expected to be some €7bn by 2020 - is substantially higher than that originally foreseen by EU member states. But Didier Faivre, the director of navigation at Esa, said the delivery cadence agreed in 2013 was being maintained. "The famous '30 satellites by 2020' motto is our goal, and we're confident we can do it with additional procurement initiated this year," he told .

The satellites for Galileo are being made by a German-UK consortium. OHB System of Bremen is the industrial prime contractor and assembles every spacecraft bus, or chassis. The navigation payloads, including the atomic clocks that are at the heart of any sat-nav concept, are prepared in Guildford by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited.A pair is currently waiting to be shipped to French Guiana's Kourou spaceport from Esa's test centre in the Netherlands for another Soyuz launch in December. A further duo (these would be numbers 13 and 14) will soon enter final testing before also being shipped to Kourou.

Esa plans just one launch in 2016, sending up a quartet of satellites on the much bigger Ariane 5 rocket. The year 2017 would likely see two launches - one pair of spacecraft lofted by Soyuz, and another quartet on an Ariane. To date, the EC has only ordered 26 satellites, so it will need soon to order more if it wants to attain the magic number of 30. However, the next procurement will almost certainly call for more than four platforms because of problems with three spacecraft already in orbit. It is not clear yet whether this trio will be able to take their place in the final constellation. One had a power failure and can no longer broadcast on all its frequencies, and the other two were put in an incorrect orbit by their Soyuz rocket.

Engineers plan to make changes to Galileo's ground systems to take account of these inadequacies, but it is by no means certain that these modifications will allow the degraded satellites to assume a fully functional role in the network.