Galileo system offline

[Grey Havoc]

EU’s satellite navigation system fully offline

Galileo was developed as an alternative to GPS.

www.politico.eu

The current problems with the nascent system were first reported on Thursday, but by Saturday evening, all 22 satellites in orbit were listed as offline. On Sunday, a public notice was posted and GNSS has so far given no timeline for fixing the issue.

 

[Grey Havoc]

EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in mysterious outage

EU's Galileo global navigation satellite system nears 100 hours of downtime.

www.zdnet.com

 

[Orionblamblam]

And yet it moves.

 

[sferrin]

And yet it moves.

???

 

[Arjen]

Eppur si muove - Galileo Galilei on leaving the court.

 

[galgot]

"related to its ground infrastructure..." ?

Update on the availability of some Galileo Initial Services

Galileo, the EU's satellite navigation system, is currently affected by a technical incident related to its ground infrastructure. The incident has led to a temporary interruption of the Galileo initial navigation and timing services, with the exception of the Galileo Search and Rescue (SAR)...

www.gsa.europa.eu

 

[TomcatViP]

Given the cost of the thing, it's quite silly to be world wide spoofed at one time like that. But well observed, the ground station seems to have been the weak link targeted.

 

[Hobbes]

a. The system is not operational yet.
b. the system was not spoofed. There's a problem at one of the ground stations (I saw a report indicating a software update had gone awry) and because the system is not operational yet, redundancy has not yet been built for that particular function.

 

[TomcatViP]

But we are past 100hr... Can't they revert to the previous build?

 

[sferrin]

Eppur si muove - Galileo Galilei on leaving the court.

I didn't bother Googling it. I assumed, Scott being Scott, it would be something Cthulu related.

 

[Arjen]

Well, that or Douglas Adams.

 

[DWG]

But we are past 100hr... Can't they revert to the previous build?

Any software rollout should have a reversion plan, but a 'technical incident' doesn't sound like a purely software problem, there may be hardware involvement as well. (We once lost our mainframe for a fortnight while I was at uni when the aircon system had an uncontained blade failure and they needed to demolish part of the building to get in to replace it).

 

[DWG]

Galilleo is back:

Galileo GPS service is back, as Europe looks at what went wrong

Galileo Initial Services have now been restored, days after an equipment malfunction caused the outage.

www.zdnet.com

With the whole constellation affected, and reports of position errors of 500m, I suspect the 'ground infrastructure' involved was the ground-based reference clocks that generate Galilleo System Time.