On 17 December, Galileo satellites 11 and 12 will be launched on top of the legendary Soyuz rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. Ten years after the launch of GIOVE A, on 28 December 2005, Galileo is now a reality.
Galileo’s 20-m IOT L-band antenna at Redu
Having completed their rigorous checks in space, two more of Europe’s Galileo satellites are now fully operational, broadcasting navigation signals and, from today, relaying search and rescue messages from across the globe.
Galileos 7 and 8 were launched from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 27 March. Once the satellites were nursed to life in orbit, their navigation payloads underwent a lengthy test campaign.
This involved assessing that the satellites themselves were performing as planned and meshing with the worldwide Galileo ground network.
The satellites’ secondary search and rescue payloads were also put to the test, picking up and relaying UHF signals from distress beacons as part of the international Cospas–Sarsat system. Read more…
Galileos arriving in French Guiana
The next Galileo launch campaign has begun with the arrival of the latest pair of navigation satellites at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.
Their arrival is the start of a busy schedule that will culminate with their launch on a Soyuz rocket on 17 December, the third Galileo launch of the year.
Galileos 11 and 12 touched down at a rain-soaked Cayenne-Félix Eboué Airport on Friday 31 October at 1300 local time.
The satellites were unloaded from their Boeing 747 aircraft, still in their humming air-conditioned containers, straight onto waiting lorries for the last leg of their trip to the Spaceport. Read more…
Albert Einstein
Europe’s fifth and sixth Galileo satellites, subject to complex salvage manoeuvres following their launch last year into incorrect orbits, will help to perform an ambitious year-long test of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity (clocks run more slowly the closer they are to heavy objects).
Galileos 5 and 6 were launched together by a Soyuz rocket on 22 August 2014. But the faulty upper stage stranded them in elongated orbits that blocked their use for navigation.
ESA’s specialists moved into action and oversaw a demanding set of manoeuvres to raise the low points of their orbits and make them more circular.
“The satellites can now reliably operate their navigation payloads continuously, and the European Commission, with the support of ESA, is assessing their eventual operational use,” explains ESA’s senior satnav advisor Javier Ventura-Traveset.
“In the meantime, the satellites have accidentally become extremely useful scientifically, as tools to test Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity by measuring more accurately than ever before the way that gravity affects the passing of time.” Read more…
This timelapse video shows Galileo satellites 9 and 10, from final preparations to liftoff on a Soyuz rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, at 02:08 GMT (04:08 CEST) on 11 September 2015.
On 20 September at 18:22 CEST, the joint ESA/CNES team at ESOC confirmed that handover of Galileo satellites 9 & 10 to the Galileo Control Centre in DLR near Munich for continuation of their mission was complete.
After a flawless orbit injection by Soyuz on 11 September, the critical launch & early orbit phase (LEOP) went extremely well, and both satellites are in excellent health and now enroute to their final operational orbits. Read more…
Europe’s own satellite navigation system has come a step nearer to completion last Friday 11 September, with Galileo 9 and 10 which lifted off together at 02:08 GMT (04:08 CEST; 23:08 local time, 10 September) from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, atop a Soyuz launcher.
All the Soyuz stages performed as planned, with the Fregat upper stage releasing the satellites into their target orbit close to 23 500 km altitude, around 3 hours and 48 minutes after liftoff.
“The deployment of Europe’s Galileo system is rapidly gathering pace” said Jan Woerner, Director General of ESA. “By steadily boosting the number of satellites in space, together with new stations on the ground across the world, Galileo will soon have a global reach. The day of Galileo’s full operational capability is approaching. It will be a great day for Europe.” Read more…