Martin Henry
"AND YET it does move," Galileo is said to have muttered sotto voce as he was leaving court. He had been on trial for his life by the Church for teaching the heresy that the earth, in fact, orbited around the sun and not the other way round.
Galileo Galilei, born in Pisa, Italy in 1564, constructed his own telescope when he heard of the invention of the instrument by the Dutchman Hans Lippershey. His astronomical observations led him to support the heliocentric view of Nicholas Copernicus that the sun was at the centre of the solar system with the planets, including earth, revolving around it. Copernicus, who died 21 years before Galileo was born, was careful to not have his strange notions published until after his death. Galileo was bolder and collided with the Church which held to Ptolemy's system from ancient Greece that the earth was the centre of the whole universe. To spare himself execution, Galileo recanted, but was confined to his house and forbidden to teach.
Galileo's apocryphal mutter helped to launch modern science.
The European Union has chosen to name its ¤3.6-billion project, Galileo, which is designed to challenge the monopoly global positioning system [GPS] of the United States. Galileo Galilei, no stranger to challenging authority and power and a keen astronomer, would have been pleased.
The first of 30 planned Galileo satellites was blasted into geo-stationary orbit, 22,300 km up, riding on a Russian Soyuz rocket from the steppes of Kazakhstan on December 28 last year.
POPPING UP EVERYWHERE
GPS uses are popping up everywhere, but essentially global positioning is using satellite communication to determine precise location on earth from way up in the sky. The 24-satellite system is owned and operated by the U.S. Department of Defence with discretionary free access granted to civilian users around the world. Galileo is a bid for independence from that dependence.
The selective availability feature of the U.S. GPS makes civilian readings less accurate. SA was switched off on May 2, 2000 leaving GPS devices with 10 times greater accuracy. But the U.S. government reserves the right to switch back on selective availability if there is a national crisis need to do so. The same global positioning system which allows a car driver or a boat operator to pinpoint their location within metres also allows missiles to be delivered with deadly accuracy. Something we are seeing in the war in Iraq and in the capacity of the Israeli security forces to take out Palestinian operatives travelling in a car or holed up in a safe house.
Galileo's service, which is under civilian control, will more than double the coverage offered by GPS, providing satellite navigation for people from motorists to sailors to mapmakers and land surveyors. In particular, Galileo is expected to improve coverage in high-latitude areas such as northern Europe. The operating European Space Agency says it can guarantee operation at all times, except in cases of the 'direst emergency'. Galileo will also be more exact than GPS, with precision of about one metre, compared to about five metres with GPS technology.
Actually, Galileo is bigger than being just a European project; six non-EU nations - China, India, Israel, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine - are involved with the project and discussions are under way with other countries.
AGREEMENT CONCLUDED
After some trans-Atlantic haggling, with Washington fearing that Galileo could pose a potential security threat, an agreement was concluded last year to make the two systems compatible with users being able to switch from one to the other. The public-private Galileo collaboration, which will create up to 150,000 new jobs in Europe alone, won't be fully operational before '08. But as a pay-for-use system against the free GPS, it will be interesting to see how things turn out.
As Galileo I challenged the authority and power of the ecclesiastical superpower of the day and radically altered the way we see the earth in the cosmos, Galileo II is challenging the political and economic superpower of today and changing the way we can be seen on the planet.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
