EU satellite navigation system Galileo has been down due to incident since Friday

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The European satellite navigation system Galileo has been down since Friday due to a ‘technical incident’. It is a problem with the infrastructure on the ground, says the organization that manages the system. Galileo can still be used as a Search and Rescue service.

What exactly happened is unclear. The Supervisory Authority for the European Global Navigation Satellite System wrote on its website on Sunday that experts are in the process of restoring the system and that an Anomaly Review Board has been set up to investigate what is going on.

According to InsideGNSS sources, there is a problem with the Precise Timing Facility. That is the system that controls the time synchronization of the network. The system includes a cesium and a hydrogen clock.

Since the outage occurred, various reports have been sent to users about the outage. The problems started on Thursday and the organization wrote that the signal may not be at full strength. A new notification came on Saturday confirming that the system had been completely down since Friday. The Galileo status page shows that virtually all of the system’s satellites are unusable. With two satellites the status is on testing, the rest is not usable.

Despite the outage, the Galileo Search and Rescue service is still available according to the Galileo administrator. That service is used to track people when they send out a distress signal. However, navigation and timing via the European satellites is not possible.

Galileo is a European alternative to the American satellite navigation system GPS. The European system has been partially operational since 2016, but a pilot phase is still under discussion. There are currently 26 satellites in the air, that should be 30 in 2020. Many smartphones already have support for the European satellite network. Qualcomm, among others, is building support for Galileo into its socs.

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