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Europe's Galileo GPS System Back after Six-Day Outage:
Europe's Galileo satellite navigation system, a rival of the American GPS network, is back in service after a six-day outage, its oversight agency said on Thursday.
"Commercial users can already see signs of recovery of the Galileo navigation and timing services, although some fluctuations may be experienced until further notice," the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency said in a statement.
[...]The European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency said the problem was due to an equipment malfunction in the ground control centres that make time and orbit predictions for the satellites.
Though a great deal of progress has been made, the Galileo system is not complete. According to Wikipedia:
The first Galileo test satellite, the GIOVE-A, was launched 28 December 2005, while the first satellite to be part of the operational system was launched on 21 October 2011. As of July 2018, 26 of the planned 30 active satellites are in orbit. Galileo started offering Early Operational Capability (EOC) on 15 December 2016, providing initial services with a weak signal, and is expected to reach Full Operational Capability (FOC) in 2019. The complete 30-satellite Galileo system (24 operational and 6 active spares) is expected by 2020. It is expected that the next generation of satellites will begin to become operational by 2025 to replace older equipment. Older systems can then be used for backup capabilities.
There are 22 satellites in usable condition (satellite is operational and contributing to the service provision), 2 satellites are in "testing" and 2 more are marked as not available.
Given the problem was with a reference time signal, I wonder if anyone involved was playing this song? Or how about this variant of it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @02:08AM
Galileo cannot function without ground centers that feed it the accurate time. If anything happens on the ground, the satellites have almost no way to continue on their own. On the other hand, time in ground centers is more accurate (a few racks of equipment that draw 10 kW is of no concern.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Friday July 19 2019, @02:41AM (3 children)
If you wanted accurate navigation you should have named it after a navigator, not a star gazer. Guys like Magellan, Vespucci. Not Columbus. Definitely not Columbus.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday July 19 2019, @09:42AM
Or not had it run in Italy. Hey, you come back domani, molto time then.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 19 2019, @03:07PM
The only Navigator I know of is Netscape.
First comes the Navigator.
Then comes the Explorer.
Then comes the Konqueror.
Then comes all the other unwashed masses of clones and "me too's". With WebKit code based on Konqueror.
I would have thought of Louis [Lane] an Clark [Kent], but they were not navigators, but rather explorers or mapmakers which is a fancy way of saying "cartographers".
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @04:20PM
Lost? Have you tried Rev. Harry Krishna?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @03:40AM (4 children)
Great job, guys! That's really putting you on a track to rival GPS.
Any stats on the reliability of GLONASS?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @04:21AM
I used GLONASS to drive to Minsk, ended up in Florida.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday July 19 2019, @07:49AM (1 child)
Yes:
Reliability since the day of official launch: Unknown because it hasn't launched yet.
This is literally still a prototype system that they say is *not* going to be ready for another year at least and *shouldn't* be used.
And they were saying that long before this problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @09:45PM
It's only taken them 20 years to get to this point. Maybe it will be declared operational in another 20.
We'll probably be operational on GPS 4 by then.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 19 2019, @03:10PM
GLONASS can reliably help you fined you're way to Siberia.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @05:59AM (6 children)
I think that the entire management team should be replaced. ASAP.
It's plausible that they're still in a '"we're only rolling out!" mental state, but even so, this pre-rollout should be used to ensure everything is running smoothly. Including, all important thought into how to manage downtime, outages, problems.
6 days. A lack of responsiveness. An almost causal response to repair it. I suspect people just went home at the end of the day, still went to hour lunches, while this outage was ongoing. And I further suspect that alerting the public with detailed info was far from their minds.
Certain jobs, require emergency overtime. This is one of them, and if things are down? There's no going home at 17:00. Hour lunches are cancelled, everyone eats in the office. Work-to-life balance is great, but not when in positions such as this, it's just part of the job.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pTamok on Friday July 19 2019, @09:18AM
I'd prefer a system that works despite hour-long lunches and people going home at 17:00, or 16:00, or 15:00. if your system is reliant on 'emergency overtime', you can guarantee that emergency overtime will be required to keep it working.
Emergency overtime is a huge red flashing sign of process failure.
(Score: 3, Touché) by bradley13 on Friday July 19 2019, @09:19AM (4 children)
"6 days. A lack of responsiveness. An almost causal response to repair it. I suspect people just went home at the end of the day, still went to hour lunches, while this outage was ongoing."
Yep. This is just typical of the EU projects I've seen. It's all about making sure everybody gets their participation prize. Half the effort is spent coordinating all the international aspects, and putting all the little pieces together, that should never have been separated in the first place. Progress on the actual project is secondary, and sometimes almost accidental.
If they had handed the whole project to the Germans, or to any country north of Germany, it would long since be operational, at a fraction of the cost. We won't mention the lack of transparency as to the actual problems, and actions being taken to fix them.
Six days. Nope, that just doesn't cut it. Not even in a system that isn't yet officially operational - because in reality it *is* in use, and has been for years.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday July 19 2019, @12:51PM
Which EU projects have you seen?
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday July 19 2019, @04:15PM (2 children)
Like the Berlin airport? https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/07/01/1417257 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday July 19 2019, @05:02PM (1 child)
Or the new Finnish Nuclear Reactor (Olkiluoto Unit 3 [wikipedia.org])
Or the direct railway line between Oslo and Hønefoss [wikipedia.org].
Or the bridge-tunnel between Rødby and Puttgarten [wikipedia.org]
I can't think of a Swedish example. Perhaps they have worked out how to project manage large projects? https://www.trafikverket.se/en/startpage/projects/Railway-construction-projects/The-West-Link-ProjectVastlanken/News-archive/2018/2018-04/complex-projects-cost-less-than-expected/ [trafikverket.se]
(Score: 1) by hwertz on Saturday July 20 2019, @05:57AM
"I can't think of a Swedish example. Perhaps they have worked out how to project manage large projects?"
Or maybe they just budget accurately. (Honestly, I don't know if it's better management or budgeting....)
It seems to me some projects run more and more over budget due to, well fill in the blanks.. poor management, unexpected problems, design flaws, specs being changed throughout the project, and so on. A local favorite is to allocate zero for weather delays in construction projects, in a part of the country where cold snaps and heat waves make it impossible for concrete or asphalt to set up at least a month out of the year.
OTHER projects seem to run over budget simply because the budget was pure fantasy, and the "over budget" costs is really more like what one would expect that type of project to cost. This is fairly common here in the US.. some project (whether it's a boondoggle, or necessary infrastructure maintenance or upgrades) is costly enough the voters or city council or whatever will not approve it. So, after the project is voted down a few times, some lower fantasy cost estimate is come up with to get the project approved. Then the project "surprisingly" goes over budget, but it's 2/3rds done by then anyway so it'd be silly to stop it dead in it's tracks by then.
(Score: 1) by hwertz on Saturday July 20 2019, @05:32AM
OK, they'll have a full orbital constellation plus a few spares. What about some ground spares? Honestly, you'd hope for what they spent on all those satellites they could have sprung to have a second atomic clock standing by on the ground.