By Xinhua
Brussels : A second satellite for the European Union’s Galileo satellite navigation project will be launched on April 27, the European Commission said Monday.
The EU Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot said that the second satellite would be launched by a Russian Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan at 4:15 a.m. local time, April 27 (2215 GMT, April 26) and the project would become operational as planned by 2013.
Galileo’s first satellite was launched in 2005. However, the second satellite (Giove-B) was delayed for almost one year due to a short-circuit problem in final testing.
The Galileo project was officially approved by the EU in 2002 aiming at building a global satellite navigation system with improved coverage and precision that is able to rival the dominance of the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) widely used in navigation devices in vehicles and ships.
The EU project claimed technically superior to GPS with precision of up to 1 meter, compared with 5 meters with GPS technology. According to the project schedule, some 30 satellites will be put into an orbit of some 20,000 km from the earth by 2013.