ESA Galileo: Soyuz launch glitch linked to frozen Hydrazine fuel pipe

A frozen fuel pipe in the upper stage of a Soyuz launcher likely caused the failure last month to place two European navigation satellites in orbit, a source close to the inquiry said Wednesday.

Confirming a report in French daily Le Monde, the source said investigators suspect a pipe containing hydrazine fuel, used by the Fregat upper stage to drive the satellites to their orbital slots, had frozen during launch.

The hydrazine pipes are located near a pipe that circulates ultra-cold liquid helium, the source said.

The two satellites, launched from Europe's base in Kourou, French Guiana, were intended to be the first two fully operational satellites in the new-generation navigation system Galileo.

30-satellite Galileo constellation. 

Credit: ESA

Two more satellites had been expected to be hoisted by the end of 2014, opening the way for a first phase of Galileo services in 2015, including applications for smartphones and in-car navigation and search-and-rescue location.

By 2017, according to the Galileo schedule, all 24 operational satellites would be in place.

Six backups would join the fleet by 2020, at which point the system would be fully operational.

Launched by a Russian-made Soyuz, the misplaced satellites should have been slotted into a circular orbit at an altitude of 23,500 kilometres (14,600 miles), inclined at 56 degrees to the equator.

Instead, they were placed in an useless elliptical orbit at a height of 17,000 kilometres (11,000 miles).

The failure adds to a catalogue of problems encountered by the 5.4-billion-euro ($7.2-billion) programme, designed to give the EU independence in satellite navigation from the US Global Positioning System (GPS).

Add caption

ESA Galileo IOV in orbit. 

Credit: ESA

Galileo, according to the project's defenders, will be more accurate and have a stronger signal, particularly in built-up areas, than its competitors.

O3b satellite network: Soyuz Launch

The O3b company has finally got its first four satellites in space.

They were launched on a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana after a day's delay due to unfavourable winds at the Sinnamary spaceport.

The satellites' deployment marks the first phase in O3b's construction of a novel telecommunications network.

It plans to put a constellation in the sky to handle voice and data traffic for mobile phone, internet and other service providers.

O3b is targeting parts of the world that currently have poor fibre-optic infrastructure.

With backing from blue chip companies such as Google, it believes its network can change the broadband experience for millions of people.

The Soyuz carrying the four satellites lifted clear of the Sinnamary launch gantry at 16:27 local time (19:27 GMT).

It was due to take more than two hours and several burns from the rocket's Fregat upper-stage to get the spacecraft into their correct 8,000km-high orbit.

Final confirmation of separation from the Fregat and a successful mission is expected shortly before 22:00 GMT.

Grander plan
The altitude is a critical part of the O3b design.

By flying in this "medium-Earth orbit", the satellites will be a quarter of the distance from Earth than is the case with traditional geostationary (GEO) telecommunications spacecraft, which sit some 36,000km above the planet.

This should reduce substantially the delay, or latency, of the signal as the voice or data traffic is routed via space.

Thales Alenia Space is already working on satellite units 9-12

For standard satellites, the latency can be 600 milliseconds or more.

O3b is promising its customers a round-trip transmission time of a little more than 100 milliseconds.

The satellites will operate in the high-frequency Ka-band and have the capability to deliver 10 beams, at 1.2Gbps per beam, to each of O3b's seven operational regions.

These are spread around the equator and reach latitudes of about 45 degrees North and South.

The company expects to start services at the end of the year, once it gets eight spacecraft in orbit, but the intention is to put up perhaps as many as 20 eventually.

"The architecture is very scalable," CEO Steve Collar told reporters. "We can keep launching satellites into that same arc and building the capacity we can deliver to our customers - and driving down the cost, importantly.

"With all telecommunications, customers want more and more data for the same amount of money, and we have to continually drive those cost benefits into our network."

The first place to benefit from the new system will be the Cook Islands in the Pacific. It has no connection to the global fibre-optic network.

New ISS Crew on their way: Expedition 36 Soyuz Launch

A Soyuz rocket with Expedition 36/37 Soyuz Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and Flight Engineers Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Karen Nyberg of NASA, onboard, launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station. 

Yurchikhin, Nyberg and Parmitano will remain aboard the station until mid-November, 2013. 

Photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls