Galileo (Spacecraft and Satellite Navigation)

The first satellites bear the names of eleven-year-old Thijs from Belgium and nine-year-old Natalia from Bulgaria who are the first winners of the European Commission’s Galileo children’s drawing competition. Competition winners from the remaining 25 Member States will name the satellites which will be launched until 2019. HP G62-a12SE Battery [4]

History

[edit]Main objectives

In 1999, the different concepts (from Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom) for Galileo were compared and reduced to one by a joint team of engineers from all four countries. HP G62-a13EE BatteryThe first stage of the Galileo programme was agreed upon officially on 26 May 2003 by the European Union and the European Space Agency.

The system is intended primarily for civilian use, unlike the United States system, which the U.S. military runs and uses on a primary basis. The U.S. reserves the right to limit the signal strength or precision of GPS, HP G62-a13SA Batteryor to shut down public GPS access completely, so that only the U.S. military and its allies would be able to use it in time of conflict. The European system will only be subject to shutdown for military purposes in extreme circumstances. It will be available at its full precision to both civil and military users. HP G62-a13SE Battery

Until 2000 the precision of the GPS signal available to non-U.S.-military users was deliberately severely limited by a timing pulse distortion process known as selective availability.

[edit]FundingHP G62-a14SA Battery

The European Commission had some difficulty funding the project’s next stage, after several allegedly “per annum” sales projection graphs for the project were exposed in November 2001 as “cumulative” projections (which for each year projected, necessarily included all previous years of sales). HP G62-a15EO BatteryThe attention that was brought to this multi-billion euro exponentially growing error in sales forecasts resulted in a general awareness in the Commission and elsewhere that it was unlikely that the program would yield the return on investment that had previously been suggested to investors and decision-makersHP G62-a15SA Battery.[5]