Two Galileo satellites sent Friday by a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana have not reached the planned orbit, according to Arianespace. This failure raises the specter of delayed commissioning of the European navigation system meant to compete with the American GPS.
The Interdepartmental Coordinator for France of the Galileo program, Jean-Yves Le Gall said Saturday that would be “difficult” to put in its proper orbit two satellites.
Arianespace said for his part that “additional observations collected after the separation of the satellites Soyuz VS09 for Galileo FOC M1 show a gap between the orbit reached and that provided. “
6000 km differences
“The satellites have been placed on a lower orbit than planned at the orbiting. Teams are studying the impact this could have on satellites,” said Will we Arianespace, which did not rule out the possibility of correcting the trajectory of the two satellites.
“We had to be on a circular orbit of 23,000 km altitude, and the orbit is not circular, elliptical and it is lower, around 17,000 km, “said Mr. Le Gall.
Scheduled to be operational in the fall after their first tests in space these two new Galileo satellites must be added to the four satellites already launched to validate the navigation system desired by the European Commission.
Europeans wanted to have their own technology, independent of American military GPS system. At a cost of more than 5 billion euros (6 billion), the program is 100% funded by the European Commission and implemented by the European Space Agency.
Swiss participation
Funding had been many negotiations between EU governments in Brussels. Switzerland will be integrated into research programs. Calculated based on the gross domestic product, the Swiss annual contribution was set at about 34 million francs.
By 2017, Galileo should count 24 satellites, which will be added later six spare satellites.
Avant technical odd Friday, it was expected that the initial Galileo services began in late 2014, before the system becomes fully operational in 2018.
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