29 ms·

Galileo satellites experiencing multiple clock failures

241 points by oherrala 10y ago

woliveirajr 10y ago
> Esa is also in contact with the Indian space agency which is using the same clocks in its sat-nav system. So far, the Indians have not experienced the same failures. Since the same technology and the same manufacturer is being used, it's a weird problem to have after the satellites are already in space.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Would it be paranoid to contemplate sabotage? After all, a global system has clear military value. In contrast the Indian system is limited in coverage to India and nearby nations.
  - greendesk 10y ago
    No, I believe your reasoning is sound.
  - pawadu 10y ago
    Given the level of political sabotage it saw when already at drawing stages I would not be surprised.
    - PJDK 10y ago
      You don't think it's a pretty big leap from political pressure (aka what all countries do to each other all the time) to sabotage, a literal act of war and something that would, if discovered, at the very least put Nato into serious jeopardy?
      - pawadu 10y ago
        no, in this case I don't think it is a huge leap.
        dajohnson89 10y ago
        for mankind?
      - dTal 10y ago
        Nah. Especially not after Stuxnet.
        PJDK 10y ago
        But that was targeted at Iran, this would be targeted at the majority of Nato. Edited to add: also, the fact that Stuxnet was discovered would be good reason to think you wouldn't attempt this. You'd need to be bullet proof certain that it would never be discovered.
      - johansch 10y ago
        It wouldn't have to be the US. It could also be Russia or China (perhaps less likely).
      - VLM 10y ago
        The sabotage doesn't have to be James Bond shooting a PPK into a wiring harness or dumping a test tube of mystery onto clock circuit boards. The Americans spent a decade and a lot of money on the first gen system in the 80s (we're on like the forth or fifth gen of GPS sats now) and the sabotage could be as simple as making it a classified state secret that mounting the physics package such that the electrodes are vertical causes microfractures in the physics package due to launch vehicle pogo resulting in 6 month lifetime on orbit, max. Or maybe mounting the physics package horizontally. Or it was spin stabilization that killed it or ... Or you thought kapton would be a great plastic film for high voltage high temperature insulation for the physics package but (mumble mumble secret squirrel stuff here) as documented in classified air force memo #classified, insert finger wagging here oh no you can't get more than 6 months lifetime on orbit shouldda used teflon (or vice versa) It could be as simple as a pdf that should have been posted to arxiv.org about some engineering peculiarity of Rb cells getting classified and buried. Maybe because it cost the US government a billion bucks to learn it the hard way back in the 80s.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
        PJDK 10y ago
        Those things aren't impossible, but also I don't see how any of those things class as "sabotage". Facebook didn't sabotage Google+ by not revealing to them how to make a successful Facebook.
  - celticninja 10y ago
    my thoughts too, Stuxnet but for GPS satellites. Too much of a threat to the US GPS system? Maybe a target for Russia but unlikely because they have no competing system. The only thing that leads away from it being US orchestrated is that they found Stuxnet, so if they found this you could be pretty sure that US/EU relations would be very shaky. Of course perhaps then Russia make it look like a US attack to divide a wedge between allies.
    - Gupie 10y ago
      >> Russia ... have no competing system Russia has GLONASS, China has BeiDOU, India IRNSS, Japan QZ
      - celticninja 10y ago
        apologies, I thought GLONASS was military use, I then checked and got stuck in wikipedia, meaning to come back and edit my comment, too late now though.
        caf 10y ago
        If you have a recent smartphone, you might be a GLONASS user and not even know it!
        flyinghamster 10y ago
        If it's an Android smartphone, recent versions of MobiWIA - Eclipsim's GPS Status & Toolbox app divide the satellite signal bar display into four sections (GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, and Galileo). Since my phone only supports GPS and GLONASS, the latter two don't show any bars.
    - vetinari 10y ago
      > Russia but unlikely because they have no competing system. Russian GLONASS had full constellation in 1995, then during late 90s it had breakages, but was fully restored by 2011 again. EU Galileo has full constellation planed for 2020.
  - Create 10y ago
    The US has already leaned hard on European officials to abandon the €1.1bn (£772m) project. Last year, the EU press spokesman for Galileo, Gilles Gantelet, declared that under the strain of American pressure, "Galileo is almost dead". While US pressure has not killed off the Galileo project entirely, concessions made by European officials mean Galileo will now be a much weaker rival to GPS than the system they had envisioned. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/dec/08/world.internationaleducationnews https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/dec/08/world.internation... Galileo will lead Europe into conflict with the US, which has security concerns about the building of a navigational network to rival its own system. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1893022.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1893022.stm The United States has security worries about the development of Galileo. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3121682.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3121682.stm
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Doesn't make any sense to me. If you wanted to avoid the threat from such a system, then you'd develop the techniques to sabotage it and then not actually do it until you needed it. If you sabotaged it now, then you'd just give them a heads-up that the system was vulnerable, and give them time to fix it.
    - fsloth 10y ago
      Unless it was considered worth the effort to try and see if they could just jeopardize the system financially. For example, nation states have the capability to compromize industrial operations with specific viruses. If a uranium enrichment centrifuge can be targeted I don't think any system can be guaranteed to be infection free.
    - throwaway1892 10y ago
      What makes you think they do not need it now?
      - mikeash 10y ago
        The lack of any mention of a major military conflict on nytimes.com, cnn.com, and news.google.com is a pretty good indication. You don't need to care about a half-finished GNSS system if you're just bombing ISIS.
        SolarNet 10y ago
        Unless you wanna kill it before it is deployed. For example if the U.S. was aware that a nation state was about to pull out on funding for it and wanted to keep the economic dominance of GPS.
        SixSigma 10y ago
        Sat January 14, 2017 Poland welcomes thousands of US troops in NATO show of force http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/14/europe/poland-us-troops-nato-welcome/ http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/14/europe/poland-us-troops-nato-w...
  - fanzhang 10y ago
    While there is some possibility (a few percent chance?), in these cases I think the majority chance is Hanlon's Razor. It's probably just a mistake on the ESA's part -- space is hard.
    - deeth_starr 10y ago
      Agreed, as a software developer I often see confounding multiple problems. Sometimes they are related to a third origin, sometimes they are just two separate problems that happened at the same time by chance. Usually they appear when all the low hanging fruit (easy bugs) are gone. Software is not hardware, I know, but my guess is these satellites are buggy as hell.
  - A_Crazy_Idea 10y ago
    This is clearly sabotage.
  - dyukqu 10y ago
    Not a conspiracy-lover, but this is what came to my mind instantly considering there is a still-ongoing investigation about another ESA project - the failure of ESA's Schiaparelli landing, which slammed into Mars back in October 2016.
    - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
      Every country but the US has had very bad luck with Mars landings. Its a non-trivial problem to solve and even the US's expertise and funding leads to failure sometimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars The idea that there's a conspiracy at work is ridiculous. We're not exactly at the "Star Trek" stage of humanity here. Landing on Mars is still risky.
      - PeCaN 10y ago
        Time to spin it the other way: the only reason the US landings on Mars are successful is because of secret government technology developed out of a covertly funded program from the 1950s as part of antigravity research.
      - halomru 10y ago
        I agree it's very unlikely that sabotage is what's going on, but what you're saying is the one compelling argument in favor of sabotage. "Everyone but that one actor has very bad luck" is exactly what sabotage looks like.
        drzaiusapelord 10y ago
        Except that actor has the most advanced space program in history. Its like saying Michael Phelps is part of a conspiracy to keep other swimmers from winning. Uh no. The world isn't one on even playing field. Some people are better than others and thus get better results.
    - kl4m 10y ago
      Please remember that the Schiaparelli lander was an experimental lander. The intention was to test the landing technology. So yes, it failed to land, but it was not exactly unexpected...
  - hellbanner 10y ago
    https://youtu.be/HTVgPw7TR_k?t=31m13s https://youtu.be/HTVgPw7TR_k?t=31m13s [30c3] "NSA/NRO sattelite parked next to major Middle-Eastern telecommunications sattelite"
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      Yes they are listening in, this isn't new the US and Russia have been launching SIGINT satellites since the late 60's....
  - logicallee 10y ago
    yes it's paranoid. nobody sabotages all of humanity's major triumphs this way, it's just not done and with good reason. I say this as someone who likely subscribes to at least 20x as many conspiracy theories (defined as the existence of one or more people conspiring) as you do.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      > nobody sabotages all of humanity's major triumphs this way It may be "humanity's triumph" for you and me, but there are people who couldn't care less about that - people, for whom the only relevant thing is its impact on their political and economical standing. Such people are the ones who tend to find their way to positions of power.
      - logicallee 10y ago
        I said ”this way”. To me it is paranoid, yes. In my opinion nobody does this. (Don’t give them any ideas, either.) These are multiply redundant time sources aboard satellites in a multibillion euro program. Nobody is sabotaging them (in my judgment†), and we don't need to even bring the idea of this into the discussion. I won't reply to any more replies about this. † Again as a disclaimer: I don't have a horse in this race and I subscribe to a ton of conspiracy theories (way more than you). This is just not one of them.
    - ben_bai 10y ago
      GPS is a military project controlled by the US. With just a switch of a button the civilian receivers will be practical worthless for navigation. They can't do that on Galileo or GLONASS. I imagine Russia can dial down GLONASS precision for civil use cases, too. At least Galileo is a competitor, and the political/military discourse about it is still ongoing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)#Tension_with_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)...
  - julio83 10y ago
    Well, considering the energy put in by US and Russia to divide European union, I will not be surprised... Divide and rule, isn't it?
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    It wouldn't be paranoid However by reading the description provided it do seems more likely it's due to mistakes Because things do behave differently "on production" and tests (and launches and space) do sometimes makes things worse
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  The India program only started launching a couple years ago. Galileo has been launching since 2006. Perhaps the clocks fail only after x amount of hours in space or some other condition based on age. The oldest Galileo sat clock has a decade of wear on it. I imagine there are some worried people in the Indian space program right now after hearing this news.
  - swatkat 10y ago
    From the article: Most of the maser failures (5) have occurred on the satellites that were originally sent into orbit to validate the system, whereas all three rubidium stoppages are on the spacecraft that were subsequently launched to fill out the network. Rubidium clock failures are being seen in "operational" Galileo satellites. First operational Galileo was launched in 2011. And, first operational Indian navigational satellite was launched in 2013. So, there's not much difference in the timeline or aging of Rubidium atomic clocks between ESA and ISRO satellites. Anyway, ISRO will be switching to indigenous atomic clocks for next generation navigation satellites[1]. [1] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/india-developing-atomic-clocks-for-use-on-satellites/article7229191.ece http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/india-devel...
- pdx 10y ago
  My SWAG is that it's not a clock problem, it's a power supply problem. All the satellites probably use the same clock power supply, regardless of which clock they chose to put into the satellite. That would explain why you have the Indian clocks by the same manufacturer all working, and why two completely different clock technologies (hydrogen maser and rubidium) are both failing.
  - madshiva 10y ago
    It's not Indian clocks it's Switzerland clock, the compagny is spectratime in the town of Neuchâtel. If they double everything they won't make this bad idea of sharing the same power supply.
    - lukeschlather 10y ago
      They're all the same clocks but the ones owned by India are working fine, so Indian clocks is a good description.
- nom 10y ago
  Most simple problems are weird if you hardware isn't accessible by any means, e.g. what do you do if it suddenly stops responding? You can't simply press the reset button, all you can do is wait and hope for the best. It's an engineers nightmare.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
paglia_s 10y ago
Is there a way to fix such problems with a software update?
- creshal 10y ago
  We won't know until we know what's the cause in the first place.
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  It sounds like a manufacturing issue to me, so I don't think so. The batch they ordered could have been faulty, but I'm assuming that ESA uses samples taken from multiple runs to minimize failures, so that's fairly unlikely.
  - planteen 10y ago
    It could be a design issue too. Like are they accidentally over-voltaging the clock with a transient or some sort of power sequencing issue? Or does some component have tin somewhere? Really hard to say at this point.
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      I really hope it's not a design issue, but that could definitely be the case. Why tin specifically?
      - eutectic 10y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_pest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_pest
      - kmm 10y ago
        Tin forms whiskers, small hairlike growths on the metal that can cause short circuits. We've already lost a satellite to this phenomenon, although I would hope it's not a problem anymore with current metallurgical techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)
jblok 10y ago
With functioning clocks, Galileo is accurate to within a metre, according to this article. That's crazy - I had no idea it was that accurate.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Apparently they wanted to make it even more accurate, but got pushback from USA before they feared it would be used by hostile forces.
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    What's the fear with more accuracy? From my (completely layman) perspective once you've got a meter or so of accuracy, you've got what you need for weapons. What's further accuracy get you that some nations are against everyone having?
    - nathancahill 10y ago
      A similar thing happens with commercial imagery satellites. Companies are forced to downsample their high resolution govt-only images to 30cm for the general public.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - blackaspen 10y ago
        My understanding is that it's not exactly "by force" but rather a condition of funding. The U.S. Government is probably Digital Globe's largest customer.
        blackguardx 10y ago
        No, it is by force. It is similar to ITAR regulations. If you break that rule, your management team is probably going to jail. It would be akin to spying for a foreign power. Source: I used to do some consulting for a satellite imagery company.
VLM 10y ago
What are the legacy GPS system stats? Its kinda important to compare before deciding the Russians hacked them. Its surprisingly difficult to find real, detailed data about the GPS system. The block II first production run of GPS sats that were launched around 1990 and decommissioned in at most 17 years had a design life of a pitiful 7 years and used dual Rb clock and Cs clocks. I'm not sure the modern block details are declassified. Anyway the failure rate for Galileo seems consistent with a "less than a decade design life" I'm not sure block IIIa is even finished designing yet. People have this peculiar idea that "the gps satellite" was launched one time in the 80s and its been running ever since... not so, gosh there must have been a hundred or so launched over the last couple decades. I have some limited experience with Rb-standards and on the ground in telco land you'll get an amazing song and dance from the mfgr about how in theory they should run for eternity but being a vacuum tube (actually conceptually closer to a fluorescent light) they do wear out and end up on ebay after a decade or so for ham radio microwave and EME operators to do peculiar things with them cheaply. Not good enough to run a data center is still stable enough to help bounce signals off the moon. I have no experience with hydrogen standards they don't even appear on ebay in my price range. Again perhaps its normal for them to wear out, etc. So Rb standards "should" die off on a regular basis. Possibly the biggest classified secret of the entire GPS project MIGHT be you have to massively overspec your clocks or you get an economic kill shot of spending a billion bucks (rubles, euros) on something that only runs six months LOL shoudda just licensed our technology that learned the lessons the hard way in developmental block I satellites in the mid 80s.
- stefantalpalaru 10y ago
  > before deciding the Russians hacked them Actually, the first suspect is the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)#Tension_with_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)...
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    The frequencies have changed after everyone realized it was a pretty darn dumb proposal to begin with. Also I like how everything is now being blamed on hacking, a freaking atomic clock that was launched on top of rocket into space fails and it's Russian hackers.
tomasbrown 10y ago
LOL. Leave space technology to the Americans.
- myrmidon 10y ago
  Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/984/ https://xkcd.com/984/
truftruf 10y ago
/r/conspiracy: The CIA probably fed them bad components or software for the clocks. Higher levels of positioning accuracy is potentially dangerous and can be misused by third parties, so the argument goes. /r/conspiracy: #2 The CIA is downvoting this post.

241 points by oherrala 10y ago

> Esa is also in contact with the Indian space agency which is using the same clocks in its sat-nav system. So far, the Indians have not experienced the same failures. Since the same technology and the same manufacturer is being used, it's a weird problem to have after the satellites are already in space.

digi_owl 10y ago
Would it be paranoid to contemplate sabotage? After all, a global system has clear military value. In contrast the Indian system is limited in coverage to India and nearby nations.
- greendesk 10y ago
  No, I believe your reasoning is sound.
- pawadu 10y ago
  Given the level of political sabotage it saw when already at drawing stages I would not be surprised.
  - PJDK 10y ago
    You don't think it's a pretty big leap from political pressure (aka what all countries do to each other all the time) to sabotage, a literal act of war and something that would, if discovered, at the very least put Nato into serious jeopardy?
    - pawadu 10y ago
      no, in this case I don't think it is a huge leap.
      - dajohnson89 10y ago
        for mankind?
    - dTal 10y ago
      Nah. Especially not after Stuxnet.
      - PJDK 10y ago
        But that was targeted at Iran, this would be targeted at the majority of Nato. Edited to add: also, the fact that Stuxnet was discovered would be good reason to think you wouldn't attempt this. You'd need to be bullet proof certain that it would never be discovered.
    - johansch 10y ago
      It wouldn't have to be the US. It could also be Russia or China (perhaps less likely).
    - VLM 10y ago
      The sabotage doesn't have to be James Bond shooting a PPK into a wiring harness or dumping a test tube of mystery onto clock circuit boards. The Americans spent a decade and a lot of money on the first gen system in the 80s (we're on like the forth or fifth gen of GPS sats now) and the sabotage could be as simple as making it a classified state secret that mounting the physics package such that the electrodes are vertical causes microfractures in the physics package due to launch vehicle pogo resulting in 6 month lifetime on orbit, max. Or maybe mounting the physics package horizontally. Or it was spin stabilization that killed it or ... Or you thought kapton would be a great plastic film for high voltage high temperature insulation for the physics package but (mumble mumble secret squirrel stuff here) as documented in classified air force memo #classified, insert finger wagging here oh no you can't get more than 6 months lifetime on orbit shouldda used teflon (or vice versa) It could be as simple as a pdf that should have been posted to arxiv.org about some engineering peculiarity of Rb cells getting classified and buried. Maybe because it cost the US government a billion bucks to learn it the hard way back in the 80s.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - PJDK 10y ago
        Those things aren't impossible, but also I don't see how any of those things class as "sabotage". Facebook didn't sabotage Google+ by not revealing to them how to make a successful Facebook.
- celticninja 10y ago
  my thoughts too, Stuxnet but for GPS satellites. Too much of a threat to the US GPS system? Maybe a target for Russia but unlikely because they have no competing system. The only thing that leads away from it being US orchestrated is that they found Stuxnet, so if they found this you could be pretty sure that US/EU relations would be very shaky. Of course perhaps then Russia make it look like a US attack to divide a wedge between allies.
  - Gupie 10y ago
    >> Russia ... have no competing system Russia has GLONASS, China has BeiDOU, India IRNSS, Japan QZ
    - celticninja 10y ago
      apologies, I thought GLONASS was military use, I then checked and got stuck in wikipedia, meaning to come back and edit my comment, too late now though.
      - caf 10y ago
        If you have a recent smartphone, you might be a GLONASS user and not even know it!
        flyinghamster 10y ago
        If it's an Android smartphone, recent versions of MobiWIA - Eclipsim's GPS Status & Toolbox app divide the satellite signal bar display into four sections (GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, and Galileo). Since my phone only supports GPS and GLONASS, the latter two don't show any bars.
  - vetinari 10y ago
    > Russia but unlikely because they have no competing system. Russian GLONASS had full constellation in 1995, then during late 90s it had breakages, but was fully restored by 2011 again. EU Galileo has full constellation planed for 2020.
- Create 10y ago
  The US has already leaned hard on European officials to abandon the €1.1bn (£772m) project. Last year, the EU press spokesman for Galileo, Gilles Gantelet, declared that under the strain of American pressure, "Galileo is almost dead". While US pressure has not killed off the Galileo project entirely, concessions made by European officials mean Galileo will now be a much weaker rival to GPS than the system they had envisioned. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/dec/08/world.internationaleducationnews https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/dec/08/world.internation... Galileo will lead Europe into conflict with the US, which has security concerns about the building of a navigational network to rival its own system. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1893022.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1893022.stm The United States has security worries about the development of Galileo. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3121682.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3121682.stm
- mikeash 10y ago
  Doesn't make any sense to me. If you wanted to avoid the threat from such a system, then you'd develop the techniques to sabotage it and then not actually do it until you needed it. If you sabotaged it now, then you'd just give them a heads-up that the system was vulnerable, and give them time to fix it.
  - fsloth 10y ago
    Unless it was considered worth the effort to try and see if they could just jeopardize the system financially. For example, nation states have the capability to compromize industrial operations with specific viruses. If a uranium enrichment centrifuge can be targeted I don't think any system can be guaranteed to be infection free.
  - throwaway1892 10y ago
    What makes you think they do not need it now?
    - mikeash 10y ago
      The lack of any mention of a major military conflict on nytimes.com, cnn.com, and news.google.com is a pretty good indication. You don't need to care about a half-finished GNSS system if you're just bombing ISIS.
      - SolarNet 10y ago
        Unless you wanna kill it before it is deployed. For example if the U.S. was aware that a nation state was about to pull out on funding for it and wanted to keep the economic dominance of GPS.
      - SixSigma 10y ago
        Sat January 14, 2017 Poland welcomes thousands of US troops in NATO show of force http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/14/europe/poland-us-troops-nato-welcome/ http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/14/europe/poland-us-troops-nato-w...
- fanzhang 10y ago
  While there is some possibility (a few percent chance?), in these cases I think the majority chance is Hanlon's Razor. It's probably just a mistake on the ESA's part -- space is hard.
  - deeth_starr 10y ago
    Agreed, as a software developer I often see confounding multiple problems. Sometimes they are related to a third origin, sometimes they are just two separate problems that happened at the same time by chance. Usually they appear when all the low hanging fruit (easy bugs) are gone. Software is not hardware, I know, but my guess is these satellites are buggy as hell.
- A_Crazy_Idea 10y ago
  This is clearly sabotage.
- dyukqu 10y ago
  Not a conspiracy-lover, but this is what came to my mind instantly considering there is a still-ongoing investigation about another ESA project - the failure of ESA's Schiaparelli landing, which slammed into Mars back in October 2016.
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    Every country but the US has had very bad luck with Mars landings. Its a non-trivial problem to solve and even the US's expertise and funding leads to failure sometimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars The idea that there's a conspiracy at work is ridiculous. We're not exactly at the "Star Trek" stage of humanity here. Landing on Mars is still risky.
    - PeCaN 10y ago
      Time to spin it the other way: the only reason the US landings on Mars are successful is because of secret government technology developed out of a covertly funded program from the 1950s as part of antigravity research.
    - halomru 10y ago
      I agree it's very unlikely that sabotage is what's going on, but what you're saying is the one compelling argument in favor of sabotage. "Everyone but that one actor has very bad luck" is exactly what sabotage looks like.
      - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
        Except that actor has the most advanced space program in history. Its like saying Michael Phelps is part of a conspiracy to keep other swimmers from winning. Uh no. The world isn't one on even playing field. Some people are better than others and thus get better results.
  - kl4m 10y ago
    Please remember that the Schiaparelli lander was an experimental lander. The intention was to test the landing technology. So yes, it failed to land, but it was not exactly unexpected...
- hellbanner 10y ago
  https://youtu.be/HTVgPw7TR_k?t=31m13s https://youtu.be/HTVgPw7TR_k?t=31m13s [30c3] "NSA/NRO sattelite parked next to major Middle-Eastern telecommunications sattelite"
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Yes they are listening in, this isn't new the US and Russia have been launching SIGINT satellites since the late 60's....
- logicallee 10y ago
  yes it's paranoid. nobody sabotages all of humanity's major triumphs this way, it's just not done and with good reason. I say this as someone who likely subscribes to at least 20x as many conspiracy theories (defined as the existence of one or more people conspiring) as you do.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > nobody sabotages all of humanity's major triumphs this way It may be "humanity's triumph" for you and me, but there are people who couldn't care less about that - people, for whom the only relevant thing is its impact on their political and economical standing. Such people are the ones who tend to find their way to positions of power.
    - logicallee 10y ago
      I said ”this way”. To me it is paranoid, yes. In my opinion nobody does this. (Don’t give them any ideas, either.) These are multiply redundant time sources aboard satellites in a multibillion euro program. Nobody is sabotaging them (in my judgment†), and we don't need to even bring the idea of this into the discussion. I won't reply to any more replies about this. † Again as a disclaimer: I don't have a horse in this race and I subscribe to a ton of conspiracy theories (way more than you). This is just not one of them.
  - ben_bai 10y ago
    GPS is a military project controlled by the US. With just a switch of a button the civilian receivers will be practical worthless for navigation. They can't do that on Galileo or GLONASS. I imagine Russia can dial down GLONASS precision for civil use cases, too. At least Galileo is a competitor, and the political/military discourse about it is still ongoing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)#Tension_with_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)...
- julio83 10y ago
  Well, considering the energy put in by US and Russia to divide European union, I will not be surprised... Divide and rule, isn't it?
- raverbashing 10y ago
  It wouldn't be paranoid However by reading the description provided it do seems more likely it's due to mistakes Because things do behave differently "on production" and tests (and launches and space) do sometimes makes things worse
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
The India program only started launching a couple years ago. Galileo has been launching since 2006. Perhaps the clocks fail only after x amount of hours in space or some other condition based on age. The oldest Galileo sat clock has a decade of wear on it. I imagine there are some worried people in the Indian space program right now after hearing this news.
- swatkat 10y ago
  From the article: Most of the maser failures (5) have occurred on the satellites that were originally sent into orbit to validate the system, whereas all three rubidium stoppages are on the spacecraft that were subsequently launched to fill out the network. Rubidium clock failures are being seen in "operational" Galileo satellites. First operational Galileo was launched in 2011. And, first operational Indian navigational satellite was launched in 2013. So, there's not much difference in the timeline or aging of Rubidium atomic clocks between ESA and ISRO satellites. Anyway, ISRO will be switching to indigenous atomic clocks for next generation navigation satellites[1]. [1] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/india-developing-atomic-clocks-for-use-on-satellites/article7229191.ece http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/india-devel...
pdx 10y ago
My SWAG is that it's not a clock problem, it's a power supply problem. All the satellites probably use the same clock power supply, regardless of which clock they chose to put into the satellite. That would explain why you have the Indian clocks by the same manufacturer all working, and why two completely different clock technologies (hydrogen maser and rubidium) are both failing.
- madshiva 10y ago
  It's not Indian clocks it's Switzerland clock, the compagny is spectratime in the town of Neuchâtel. If they double everything they won't make this bad idea of sharing the same power supply.
  - lukeschlather 10y ago
    They're all the same clocks but the ones owned by India are working fine, so Indian clocks is a good description.
nom 10y ago
Most simple problems are weird if you hardware isn't accessible by any means, e.g. what do you do if it suddenly stops responding? You can't simply press the reset button, all you can do is wait and hope for the best. It's an engineers nightmare.

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paglia_s 10y ago

Is there a way to fix such problems with a software update?

creshal 10y ago
We won't know until we know what's the cause in the first place.
Cyph0n 10y ago
It sounds like a manufacturing issue to me, so I don't think so. The batch they ordered could have been faulty, but I'm assuming that ESA uses samples taken from multiple runs to minimize failures, so that's fairly unlikely.
- planteen 10y ago
  It could be a design issue too. Like are they accidentally over-voltaging the clock with a transient or some sort of power sequencing issue? Or does some component have tin somewhere? Really hard to say at this point.
  - Cyph0n 10y ago
    I really hope it's not a design issue, but that could definitely be the case. Why tin specifically?
    - eutectic 10y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_pest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_pest
    - kmm 10y ago
      Tin forms whiskers, small hairlike growths on the metal that can cause short circuits. We've already lost a satellite to this phenomenon, although I would hope it's not a problem anymore with current metallurgical techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)

jblok 10y ago

With functioning clocks, Galileo is accurate to within a metre, according to this article. That's crazy - I had no idea it was that accurate.

digi_owl 10y ago
Apparently they wanted to make it even more accurate, but got pushback from USA before they feared it would be used by hostile forces.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  What's the fear with more accuracy? From my (completely layman) perspective once you've got a meter or so of accuracy, you've got what you need for weapons. What's further accuracy get you that some nations are against everyone having?
  - nathancahill 10y ago
    A similar thing happens with commercial imagery satellites. Companies are forced to downsample their high resolution govt-only images to 30cm for the general public.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - blackaspen 10y ago
      My understanding is that it's not exactly "by force" but rather a condition of funding. The U.S. Government is probably Digital Globe's largest customer.
      - blackguardx 10y ago
        No, it is by force. It is similar to ITAR regulations. If you break that rule, your management team is probably going to jail. It would be akin to spying for a foreign power. Source: I used to do some consulting for a satellite imagery company.

VLM 10y ago

What are the legacy GPS system stats? Its kinda important to compare before deciding the Russians hacked them. Its surprisingly difficult to find real, detailed data about the GPS system. The block II first production run of GPS sats that were launched around 1990 and decommissioned in at most 17 years had a design life of a pitiful 7 years and used dual Rb clock and Cs clocks. I'm not sure the modern block details are declassified. Anyway the failure rate for Galileo seems consistent with a "less than a decade design life" I'm not sure block IIIa is even finished designing yet. People have this peculiar idea that "the gps satellite" was launched one time in the 80s and its been running ever since... not so, gosh there must have been a hundred or so launched over the last couple decades. I have some limited experience with Rb-standards and on the ground in telco land you'll get an amazing song and dance from the mfgr about how in theory they should run for eternity but being a vacuum tube (actually conceptually closer to a fluorescent light) they do wear out and end up on ebay after a decade or so for ham radio microwave and EME operators to do peculiar things with them cheaply. Not good enough to run a data center is still stable enough to help bounce signals off the moon. I have no experience with hydrogen standards they don't even appear on ebay in my price range. Again perhaps its normal for them to wear out, etc. So Rb standards "should" die off on a regular basis. Possibly the biggest classified secret of the entire GPS project MIGHT be you have to massively overspec your clocks or you get an economic kill shot of spending a billion bucks (rubles, euros) on something that only runs six months LOL shoudda just licensed our technology that learned the lessons the hard way in developmental block I satellites in the mid 80s.

stefantalpalaru 10y ago
> before deciding the Russians hacked them Actually, the first suspect is the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)#Tension_with_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)...
- dogma1138 10y ago
  The frequencies have changed after everyone realized it was a pretty darn dumb proposal to begin with. Also I like how everything is now being blamed on hacking, a freaking atomic clock that was launched on top of rocket into space fails and it's Russian hackers.

tomasbrown 10y ago

LOL. Leave space technology to the Americans.

myrmidon 10y ago
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/984/ https://xkcd.com/984/

truftruf 10y ago

/r/conspiracy: The CIA probably fed them bad components or software for the clocks. Higher levels of positioning accuracy is potentially dangerous and can be misused by third parties, so the argument goes. /r/conspiracy: #2 The CIA is downvoting this post.