Galileo satellite's secure codes cracked

One of the consequences of a national policy that tax payers should have free access to the data their taxes pay for - as is the case in the US - is that if you tell American researchers something is free or open source, their expectations are raised.

So when a team of researchers led by Mark Psiaki, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, discovered that the signals coming from a European test satellite that they thought to be accessible were instead protected by secret codes, they set about cracking them and succeeded.

But their success, which allows them and others to test prototype receivers for Europe's new global satellite navigation system, raises two questions: can the body in charge of it, the Galileo Joint Undertaking, succeed as a public-private partnership? And how open will its service be? Constellation of 30 satellites.

Galileo will be like the familiar US-built and operated Global Positioning system, but promises greater accuracy - to within 1m, compared to GPS's 10m. Galileo's constellation of 30 satellites will be launched between 2008 and 2010 at a cost of 2.3bn (o1.5bn).

One-third will be paid by public funds, and the rest will come from a consortium of eight companies, including Alcatel and Inmarsat. Galileo's pre-launch phase, including the test satellite, has so far cost ?1.3bn, shared equally between the member states of the EU and the European Space Agency.

By comparison, GPS costs the US treasury about $400m (o211m) a year, including satellite updates. In return for its investment, the Galileo consortium expects to market applications based on secured commercial services - including global search-and-rescue, and others restricted to organisations of EU member states.

Besides that and the open service professor Psiaki is interested in, Galileo will offer three other secured services: global search-and-rescue, safety-of-life (for airplanes), and a public regulated service open only to EU member state emergency and government services.

The Galileo Joint Undertaking business plan (at www.galileoju.com) estimates that the market for satellite navigation applications will grow from 30bn (o20bn) in 2004 to 276bn (o187bn) by 2020. Part of Galileo's goal is to improve global accuracy and availability. To enable that, an EU-US agreement says Galileo will use the same set of radio frequencies as GPS and in return must offer an open service "without direct fees for end use".

But having had to crack the test satellite's codes, Psiaki asks whether Galileo intends to charge for the part of the service that's supposed to be open? And if it does, would Europeans and Americans be charged different rates? "I, and a lot of people, want Galileo to succeed," Psiaki says, "but I don't want to be shut out.

We're talking about a market that's worth $15bn a year, maybe $200bn by 2020. The Europeans aren't dumb and they want to get a big share of that, and Americans are worried that there may be some effort to corner that market on the part of Europe. "

Psiaki's story began in January, when Galileo's newly launched test satellite, GIOVE-A, began transmitting coded test signals. Psiaki, who is designing a receiver to study the ionosphere, wanted to use the signals to test his design, and emailed a request for the codes to Martin Unwin at Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, the company that designed and built the GIOVE-A satellite.

(The Guardian)