Published in News

New GPS satellites inaccurate

by on18 June 2009

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Problems in orbit


The last GPS satellite launched by the Pentagon is not working properly and there are fears that the problems might extend to the designs of all of the next generation of the widely used satellites.

The Air Force's Southern California space acquisition centre said that a GPS satellite, manufactured by Lockheed Martin and launched in March, is experiencing “performance problems” in orbit. It is expected to undergo a battery of tests expected to stretch through October to try to resolve the problems.

The satellite is the first to include a new civilian frequency, L5, which is designed for use by future nationwide air-traffic control systems. However it looks like that signal is interfering with other signals from the satellite and reducing their accuracy. The degraded signals are accurate only to about 20 feet, versus about two feet for typical GPS signals.

Boeing has 12 satellites it wants to launch using the same L5 signal. Already the project is years behind schedule and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget.
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