European GPS Satellites Orbit Too Close to Home—ESA Finds Major Implications to the Anomaly

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Fired yesterday afternoon after a 24-hour delay caused by poor weather conditions, two European satellites named Doresa and Milena have now fallen into a lower unanticipated orbit around the Earth, causing major problems for the international European Space Agency (ESA).

As part of Europe's $7.29 billion project to develop a satellite navigation network to compete with the current American GPS, the two final satellites to be launched this year, which are the fifth and sixth out of the 30 planned for the global positioning system, were launched Friday Aug. 22 from French Guiana by the lead aerospace company Arianespace. After being fired on a Russian-made Soyuz rocket merely 24 hours before, Arianespace confirmed that the satellites did not reach their intended destination.

"Observations taken after the separation of the satellites from the Soyuz VS09 for the Galileo Mission show a gap between the orbit achieved and that which was planned" Arianespace said in a statement released this morning. "They have been placed on a lower orbit than expected. Teams are studying the impact this could have on the satellite."

It is unclear at the moment whether or not the satellites will function in the different orbit, as they must exchange data back and forth with satellites on another orbit, however, the ESA is exploring all avenues at the moment.

As a publically funded venture, funded and owned entirely by the European Union, the Galileo Mission has promised to create 15,000 to 20,000 jobs in the European Union once finished, however, has seen many problems since the project began in 2011. In fact, on top of the 24-hour delay, Doresa and Milena are more than a year behind schedule Arianespace reports.

President of the French space agency CNES, Jean-Yves Le Gall says that "the Galileo navigation network is a very complex program and failures are unfortunately part of the life of operations." Le Gall confirms that further investigation is still needed to determine how drastic the errors in precision will be, and whether the errors could be adjusted now that the satellites were placed in orbit. He says that European Space Agency experts throughout Germany and France are currently calculating whether or not small internal motors implemented on the satellites could be strong enough to force them into the correct orbit, but foresees subsequent consequences arising from this unforeseen error.

Le Gall and Arianespace report that if the two satellites cannot be adjusted to the correct orbit of the planned altitude above the Earth, then subsequent satellites would have to be launched to take their places, adding additional costs to the already grandiose budget.