Galileo satnav fleet waxes orbital Europe's home-grown Galileo satnav system will take another step towards a full constellation tomorrow when satellites 13 and 14 head heavenwards from Kourou in French Guiana. Galileos 13 and 14 during encapsulation. Pic: ESA / CNES / Arianespace – JM Guillon Galileos 13 and 14 during encapsulation at Kourou. Pic: ESA / CNES …
Is anyone able to tell me what the three blue dishes are that look like PA speakers? I'm assuming they're not because of their proximity and direction, and earnestly hope they have a far more exciting function.
No real reason to ask other than my eyes were instantly drawn to them.
I'd say they are PA speakers. Maybe one PA system for the usual stuff* plus two (redundant) systems for sounding alarms? They are dealing with nasty stuff in there. The other blue thing on the wall looks like a dispenser for paper towels to me. Which supports my theory that the stainless steel thingy is a sink set into the wall, probably combined with a ventilation system to get rid of dangerous fumes.
Anyway, cool chemsuits! I've never seen suits with that kind of helmet.
* "Will the owner of the yellow Subaru please move their car, it's blocking the fire exit."
Can anyone point to how many Car sat navs and which consumer gear is ready to receive the signals or do we have to wait a generation to actually be able to use the service? I notice that my iPhone can pick up GPS and Glonass but I will probably replace it by the time the constellation is in service, would be nice (although not that important) if it also picked up Galileo.
If I buy a (European) car this year I assume I wont be able to benefit from this. How long before we can directly benefit?
Chipsets do exist e.g. Broadcomm's Galileo, GPS, GLONASS, SBAS, QZSS and BeiDou supporting BCM4774. Unless there are 'incentives' I don't see adoption of Galileo and others in mass-market devices; GPS is currently 'good enough for the majority of consumers so why change and GLONASS is only there to avoid Russia's 25% import duty.
See: http://www.gsc-europa.eu/helpdesk/faqs
"Once the Galileo services are available, the applications will be ready to be offered to the market. Fortunately, the interface control documents for the Galileo signal will be available well before the services are declared operational (this is already the case for the Galileo Open Service signal), so that the industry can develop their solutions in advance. Then, the market forces will be the final drivers of the penetration of these applications among the public. However, as other GNSS-based solutions are already present in any facet of our lives (for example, in our vehicles), the introduction of Galileo will likely represent only an upgrade of the existing equipment; in other words, it will not be necessary to start from scratch."
Presumably the European Union having many large armies, defense treaties, strategic interests over a significant fraction of the earth and a big chunk of it's people felt a GPS type system that didn't depend on the goodwill of the Americans or Russians was a good idea.
I think I agree with them.
felt a GPS type system that didn't depend on the goodwill of the Americans or Russians was a good idea.
'Cept the yanks bullied us into using a different frequency for Galileo, so they can jam Galileo without affecting GPS. So it still depends on the goodwill of the yanks.
But there is a slightly higher diplomatic threshold for deliberately jamming or shooting down Eu satelites than there is for simply degrading GPS accuracy over europe to the point that road/rail/air transport is made a lot slower and more expensive as a resposnse to a trade arguement
You assume wrong. Your directly benefiting right now.
Galileo is almost perfectly compatible with the American GPS system and everybody benefits from greater accuracy on the GPS system (the more satilites the better the precision of the location).
The only compatibility exception is that the "kill" switch to turn it off is under EU rather than USA control so if the americans decide to turn off GPS while fighting a war (or just as economic blackmail on somebody) then we still have usable GPS unless they shoot our satilites down.
Pretty much every possible choice of fuel for a rocket is generally unpleasant to be around at best because it takes a lot of energy to lob a satellite into orbit, and all that energy has to be locked up in the fuel somehow.
The reason the SupeDraco thrusters use hypergolic propellants (not hydrazine) is so they don't need to have an igniter, the fuels will spontaneously ignite as soon as they mix. This also means they can be restarted, and fired multiple times.
If you think that lighting a rocket sounds easy, here's some actual rocket scientists explaining some of the difficulties.
Pretty much every possible choice of fuel for a rocket is generally unpleasant to be around at best because it takes a lot of energy to lob a satellite into orbit, and all that energy has to be locked up in the fuel somehow.
There's nasty, and there's nasty. No liquid oxidizer is ever pleasant. Even the oxidizers sometimes described as safe - liquid oxygen and hydrogen peroxide - have their hazards, usually involving fires with everyday substances (e.g., liquid oxygen and asphalt) or just exploding on their own because they touched something innocuous (e.g., peroxide and copper). After those the oxidizers go downhill in safety, presenting risks involving fire, poison, and corrosiveness - like those used in the Dragon's RCS.
Some fuels, though, aren't too terrible. You don't want kerosene sprinkled on your morning fry up, but it's not instant death. Ethanol has some history in spaceflight. Hydrogen and methane aren't corrosive or toxic, and without sulfurous additives to help personnel identify leaks the latter doesn't even smell bad. (Sure, they can suffocate and freeze you when they're not incinerating you, but they're not poisonous.)
Quite a few of those oxidizer-fuel combinations have gotten extensive assessments as alternatives to hypergolics for manned spacecraft RCS. The advantages of hypergolics - density, easy storage, adequate exhaust velocity - are not unique. Even ease of ignition is not solely a feature of hydrazine, mixed oxides of nitrogen, and other hypergolics. Peroxide decomposed over a catalyst produces lots of heat and oxygen - a hydrocarbon like kerosene injected into that environment will ignite. (For that matter, hydrogen peroxide can be used as a monopropellant of reduced performance.) NASA was quite close to adopting liquid oxygen and ethanol for the shuttle in a refit simply because of the hazards of its older RCS propellants, though the shuttle had the volume and fittings to carry liquid oxygen not available to a small capsule.
So, the availability of equivalents makes me wonder about the dogged use of toxic fuels as RCS propellants. Is it the stated advantages, which are not so unique, or the proven engineering and simplification of systems?
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