Galt's Gulch

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

Posted by $ Your_Name_Goes_Here 5 years, 5 months ago to Technology
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Anything viewed as Mission Critical, which I would consider military GPS to be, needs to be locked down with no back doors. Is it possible that the EU civilian (not military?) GPS did not adhere to this principle??
SOURCE URL: https://www.zdnet.com/article/european-gps-satellites-have-been-down-for-four-days-in-mysterious-outage/

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  • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 5 months ago
    Can you say...coronal hole stream from the sun?...the KP index did rise above KP4... and the shields, their down 25+%, captain
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    • Posted by lrshultis 5 years, 5 months ago
      An update:

      https://www.zdnet.com/article/galileo...

      Highly unlikely that was Sun caused. The satellites are orbiting the Earth at about 23000 kilometers and some would be on the opposite side of the Earth when the event happened. Since the Satellites are outside the Van Allan belts they would not function for long with out proper shielding. The atomic clocks on the satellites continued to operate but the more likely problem was with the ground stations. Not every problem comes from Solar activity, although the big one may sometime come this way. Then the real trouble will start. Then we will have several hours to put on our tinfoil hats and wrap all our gadgets in aluminum foil Faraday cages.
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      • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 5 months ago
        Even Blockchain knows enough and plans a shut down of the satellites during the an event because the shielding is not quite enough.

        I am also wondering about the increases in Cosmic radiation due to our weakened magnetic shields.

        Coronal hole streams and cosmic radiation could effect: [] " the problem was [] "ground infrastructure" affecting the calculation of time and orbit predictions, and which are used to compute the navigation message. "The malfunction affected different elements on the ground facilities,"[].
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    • Posted by $ Your_Name_Goes_Here 5 years, 5 months ago
      Why wouldn't the EU just say so? And wouldn't that affect all satellite transmission (including the US GPS satellites)?
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      • Posted by DrZarkov99 5 years, 5 months ago
        Us GPS satellites have been shielded against solar flares for the last couple of generations. They are primarily military systems, with survivability built in.
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        • Posted by $ Your_Name_Goes_Here 5 years, 5 months ago
          Do you know if comm satellites are as well? I suspect there are accepted minimum standards for anything going into orbit but I'm not an expert in that area...
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          • Posted by DrZarkov99 5 years, 5 months ago
            The military DSCS satellites are hardened, but I suspect the commercial variety are not. I have not heard anything about comm satellite outages, and the news media seem not to be having any trouble with overseas communications.
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        • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 5 months ago
          It's not enough Doc, frequently they must be shut down and restarted, which happens more often now...but the European one's sure are a curiosity...I also mentioned below about the need to shut them down because of Iran or possibly the cabal and their destructive schemes.
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          • Posted by lrshultis 5 years, 5 months ago
            So what happens to gps when they are shut down?

            https://www.gpsworld.com/the-day-gps-...

            That must have been a real bad few days in Russia.
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              Posted by DrZarkov99 5 years, 5 months ago
              First of all, Russia relies on its own navigation system, GLONASS. I'm not sure how it compares in accuracy, but they do have an alternative. Second, what the article does not mention is the alternative of navigation by pulsar signal, which has only recently been tested. Pulsar navigation uses the periodic pulses of radiation from known stars with this characteristic, and has shown an accuracy similar to the early days of GPS. There's a lot more work needs to be done, but pulsar navigation could be a component of a GPS backup.
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            • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 5 months ago
              Thanks, interesting article...true, the US and many other parts of the world are not ready to physically read maps and charts.
              When I first got a GPS in the 90s...it sucked, I used Loran to backup my charting and as you know, most of us here grew up with maps.
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      • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 5 years, 5 months ago
        1 The don't know like We would because NASA watches for those things. 2 It all depends upon what side of the earth or satellites were facing the sun when the stream came in.

        Again, not saying definitively that is what happened but the timing is curious.
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  • Posted by CaptainKirk 5 years, 5 months ago
    This reminds me of a lunch I had with someone working on Trains... He was interested in my background and asked how much GPS experience I had...

    So, I asked: "Do you have a problem with the trains getting lost?"

    It turned out that they were going to use the GPS locations to trigger the announcements, and to update where the train was for others.

    So, I asked again: "Don't you get the current location of the train in the monitoring station?"

    He said: "Yeah, but it's political to try to access that"...

    I didn't get the work, and frankly didn't mind not getting it. I hate working for screwed up bureaucracies
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  • Posted by $ allosaur 5 years, 5 months ago
    Could be that EU's global navigation satellite system merely has some "Galileo glitch" yet to be found and fixed.
    Lots of other untroubled satellites orbiting around up there.
    Me dino would not care to take a tethered "space walk" with all those projectiles zipping around.
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  • Posted by $ Stormi 5 years, 5 months ago
    I have read some of the satellites and radar are already being blacked out by the attempts of the Earth's magnetic poles to switch. They have moved, but moved back, one moved toward Russia. It was predicted it would cuause outages.
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