Cutting Edge

Europe's GPS project has been severely criticized by European Commission auditors for running over budget and deadline.

The Galileo satellite-network project, which aims to provide a European civilian rival to the U.S. military's GPS system, was launched in the mid-1990s, and due to be completed by 2013. The European Court of Auditors said in a special report on Monday that the project had seen "substantial delays and cost overruns."

The Galileo satellite-network project aims to provide a European civilian rival to the U.S. military's GPS system.

(Credit: ESA- J.Huart)

The auditors' report covered the period from 2003 to 2006, when the project was managed by the Galileo Joint Undertaking (GUJ), a body set up by the European Commission and the European Space Agency.

The court concluded that management by the GUJ during this time period was inadequate. According to the auditors, the Galileo program experienced problems at different levels, including a failure to adequately negotiate and carry through a public-private partnership (PPP).

"The GJU's most important task was to negotiate a public-private partnership under which the private sector would invest, in partnership with the European Commission, in the creation and use of the Galileo infrastructure," said the report. "Negotiations with the private sector on a concession agreement stalled in early 2007."

The audit found that the partnership plan was inadequately prepared and conceived. As a result, the GJU was required to negotiate a PPP that the auditors described as unrealistic. The court said that the GJU's task of supervising technological development was seriously constrained by governance issues and an incomplete budget.

The Galileo project was initially budgeted at 3 billion euros ($4.24 billion), but a UK Transport Subcommittee estimated in 2007 that this could rise to 14.2 billion euros ($20.06 billion).

Also in their report, the auditors pointed out that the integration of European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (Egnos) into Galileo was only partially successful. Egnos is a joint venture with the U.S. and Japan to use ground infrastructure to track satellites.

The auditors also found that the Commission did not provide adequate leadership in developing and managing Galileo.

A Commission spokesperson was unavailable for comment at the time of writing.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Running a day late because of stormy weather, a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket boosted a new GOES weather satellite into space Saturday to serve as an orbital spare for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's fleet of hurricane-tracking weather sentinels.

The Delta 4, equipped with two strap-on solid-fuel boosters, ignited with a rush of flame and smoke at 6:51 p.m. EDT and quickly climbed away from launch complex 37 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, arcing to the east and accelerating toward orbit.

"Three, two, one, and liftoff of the Delta 4 rocket with GOES-O, enhancing quality and reliability of the weather satellite for the forecaster," said NASA launch commentator George Diller.

A United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket carrying a new GOES weather satellite roars to life and blasts off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

(Credit: NASA TV)

It was the 10th flight of a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket since 2002 and the second of three launches planned for this year.

A launch attempt Friday was called off because of thunderstorms and electrical activity near the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. More of the same was on tap Saturday and forecasters initially predicted a 70 percent chance of a launch delay.

Thunderstorms rolled over the launch pad during fueling, but conditions improved as the afternoon wore on and after a 37-minute delay to allow a storm cell to move past to the south, United Launch Alliance proceeded with the countdown.

The Delta 4's first stage performed normally, boosting the vehicle to an altitude of about 90 miles before falling away four-and-a-half minutes after liftoff.

The rocket's second stage then lofted the spacecraft into an initial parking orbit before two additional firings needed to place the 7,000-pound GOES-O satellite into an elliptical transfer orbit with a high point of about 21,800 miles and a low point of 4,100 miles.

The satellite separated from the Delta's second stage on time at 11:12 p.m. Onboard thrusters will be used to put the spacecraft in its final circular orbit 22,300 miles above the equator. That milestone is expected July 8 and if all goes well, Boeing Space and Intelligence Systems will turn the satellite over to the government on July 18.

With space shuttle Endeavour in the foreground atop pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, a Delta 4 rocket takes off to deliver a new weather satellite to orbit.

(Credit: NASA TV)

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite system provides the hemispheric views familiar from television weathercasts. Observations of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the East Coast are provided by the GOES-12 satellite--critical for hurricane tracking--with GOES-11 providing similar coverage of the the West Coast and the central Pacific Ocean past Hawaii.

GOES-O will be known as GOES-14 once at the station, joining the GOES-13 satellite, which was launched three years ago, as an orbital spare.

"GOES-O will provide another important operational asset to NOAA and will become part of the nation's infrastructure for both weather and environmental forecasting," said Steve Kirkner, GOES project manager at NASA.

In an unprecedented space collision, a commercial Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian satellite ran into each other Tuesday above northern Siberia, creating a cloud of wreckage, officials said today. The international space station does not appear to be threatened by the debris, they said, but it's not yet clear whether it poses a risk to any other military or civilian satellites.

"They collided at an altitude of 790 kilometers (491 miles) over northern Siberia Tuesday about noon Washington time," said Nicholas Johnson, NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "The U.S. space surveillance network detected a large number of debris from both objects."

A rendering of an Iridium satellite near earth.

(Credit: Iridium Satellite)

Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael Carey, deputy director of global operations with U.S. Strategic Command, the agency responsible for space surveillance, said initial radar tracking detected some 600 pieces of debris. He identified the Russian spacecraft as Cosmos 2251, a communications relay station launched in June 1993, and said the satellite is believed to have been non-operational for the past 10 years or so.

"As of about 12 hours ago, I think the head count was up (to around) 600 pieces," Carey told CBS News late today. "It's going to take about two days before we get a solid picture of what the debris fields look like. But you, I think, can imply that the majority of that should be probably along the same line as the original orbits."

He said U.S. STRATCOM routinely tracks about 18,000 objects in space, including satellites and debris, that are 3.9 inches across or larger. Tracking priority and "conjunction analysis"--identifying which objects may pose a threat to manned spacecraft--is the first priority.

"It's going to take a while" to get an accurate count of the debris fragments, Johnson said. "It's very, very difficult to discriminate all those objects when they're really close together. And so, over the next couple of days, we'll have a much better understanding."

Asked which satellite was at fault, Johnson said "they ran into each other. Nothing has the right of way up there. We don't have an air traffic controller in space. There is no universal way of knowing what's coming in your direction."

This image shows the inauguration scene from more than 400 miles in space. You can see the dark clusters of ant-like people gathered around the Capitol and in front of JumboTrons along the National Mall.

(Credit: GeoEye Satellite Image)

U.S. President Barack Obama was sworn in on Tuesday in Washington. But the number of people who braved the frigid D.C. weather to watch the historic event could have been anywhere between 800,000 and 3 million, depending on who you talk to.

Researchers have projected widely varying figures for the event's attendance, based on satellites circling above the clouds, aerostat balloons tethered blocks away, television coverage of the crowd, and good old-fashioned mathematics calculations.

Steve Doig, a journalism professor at Arizona State University who specializes in crowd counting, said he is estimating there were 800,000 people in attendance, based on a satellite image taken by GeoEye about 40 minutes before the swearing-in ceremony.

"The space-based image is fascinating because all the low-level shots make you think the crowd is much larger. (In the satellite images), you see the very dense clots of people in front of the JumboTrons, but then the wide open spaces elsewhere," Doig said. "I'd still suspect this crowd was larger than the Lyndon Johnson one, which wasn't estimated with the benefit of an image from this excellent viewpoint."

Estimates have put Johnson's inauguration attendance at 1.2 million, but Doig said he thinks that figure is inflated.

With the images, Doig tries to figure out how many people there might be per square foot and then factors in the surface area.

"It's actually fairly simple math, getting the square footage and dividing that by some number of feet per person," he said. "A scary mosh pit is 2.5 square feet per person. That's about as tight as you can pack people, where they can't move--elevator tight."

If people up and down the Mall were crammed that tight, there could have been 2 million, he said.

GeoEye collected a high-resolution image of Washington, D.C., at 11:19 a.m. EST from 423 miles in space, said Mark Brender, GeoEye vice president of marketing and communications.

"There were high, wispy light clouds, but one could clearly see throngs of people, especially gathered around the large JumboTron televisions spread along the National Mall," he said. "The satellite collects imagery at 41 centimeter ground resolution, so one is able to see an object the size of home plate on a baseball diamond."

Satellites owned by Digital Globe also took shots, from 300 miles up following the polar orbit at a speed of about 17,000 miles per hour, said company spokesman Chuck Herring.

This shot was taken from a satellite 300 miles high.

(Credit: Digital Globe)

Others made estimates based on video images.

"I just watched the event in the American embassy in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates!!" Farouk El-Baz, a Boston University professor who is considered the leading authority on providing crowd estimates, wrote in an e-mail. "I do not have the pictures yet, but the video images show nearly 3 million people!"

El-Baz explained how he arrived at his figure this way: The area between the steps of the Capitol Building and the Lincoln Memorial is 2.2 miles. The width of the National Mall is half a mile and there is another one mile along the western greens, he said. "If this area is nearly full it can accommodate at least 3 million people," he said.

"Crowd counting is an art," said Curt Westergard, president of Digital Design and Imaging Service, which took photos of the event with 360-degree spherical panoramic cameras attached to balloons bobbing 500 feet above and a few blocks away from the White House. Fiber-optic cables tethered the balloons to a special launch trailer, which transmitted live shots to CNN.

"We're trying to contribute some of the oblique-angle photos of the scene that might see things under trees that satellite photos might miss (or) people standing in alcoves," he said.

The cameras took the shots between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. EST, when they were forced to shut down due to air space regulations. The balloons, which measure about 12.5 feet in diameter, only rose to 500 feet instead of 800 feet because of issues with President Bush's helicopter, according to Westergard.

Fixed-wing planes and even helicopters usually can be used, but were prohibited from coming near the event for security reasons.

The U.S. National Park Service, threatened with a lawsuit over its crowd estimate for the Million Man March in 1995, stopped doing crowd projections as a matter of policy. But the agency changed its mind for the Obama inauguration, although it won't release a figure until later in the week, according to USA Today.

Imaging technology also was being used to help the U.S. Department of Interior keep track of crowds for security, public safety, and traffic purposes, according to the GIS Cafe Web site. The Interior Department uses a wall-sized display of high-resolution flat-screen, tiled LCD monitors called the "OptIPortal" that displays 35-megapixel aerial imagery, the report said.

An image of the inauguration crowd shot by a camera attached to a balloon 500 feet above the ground.

(Credit: AirPhotosLIVE)

(See more satellite images from GeoEye here.)

A United Kingdom-led mission to put a satellite in orbit around the moon, potentially enabling lunar colonists to use mobile phones to communicate with each other, has inched a step closer to blastoff.

The British National Space Centre has announced that it will undertake a technical-feasibility study of the MoonLITE, or Moon Lightweight Interior and Telecom Experiment, mission, which Lord Drayson, the U.K. minister of state for science and innovation, said could help answer fundamental questions about the composition of the moon.

The study will report with a full mission schedule and costs late next year. It is expected to take nine months, with the support of NASA, which is assessing any potential contribution it could make to the science and technology of the mission. A tender process for the feasibility study contract will run until March.

Depending on the outcome of the study, the MoonLITE mission could launch by about 2014, the BNSC said, reiterating that no decision will be made to proceed with, build, or launch the MoonLITE mission until the study has reported its findings.

The plan for the mission is to put a satellite in orbit around the moon for use as a telecommunications station, relaying data from a network of geophysical instruments on the moon's surface back to Earth.

The instruments will gather data on the strength and frequency of moonquakes, as well as on the thickness of the crust and core. They also aim to determine whether organic material or water is present in the moon's polar regions.

In addition to relaying this scientific data back to Earth, the satellite system should also ensure a full four-bar mobile signal for lunar colonists living in a moon base, which NASA wants to build after 2020.

Natasha Lomas of Silicon.com reported from London.