GIOVE

GIOVE (Italian for 'Jupiter'; pronounced [ˈdʒɔːve]), or Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element, is the name for two satellites built for the European Space Agency (ESA) to test technology in orbit for the Galileo positioning system.

This article is about the satellites. For other uses, see GIOVE (disambiguation).

The name was chosen as a tribute to Galileo Galilei, who discovered the first four natural satellites of Jupiter, and later discovered that they could be used as a universal clock to obtain the longitude of a point on the Earth's surface.

The GIOVE satellites are operated by the GIOVE Mission (GIOVE-M) segment in the frame of the risk mitigation for the In Orbit Validation (IOV) of the Galileo positioning system.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.