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A few months ago one of the satellites was still broadcasting while it was down for routine maintenance, reporting some time that was off by a third of the distance to the sun.

There are enough weird GPS errors that I'd hope they have a backup plan already.



Wouldn't the GPS ephemeris/almanac data would still list the satellite as inop, even if it's still transmitting?


They did, so actual GPS location chips weren't thrown off. But apparently there are GPS-based clocks out there that don't actually bother to read the almanac.

(I'm a few layers removed from the error report where I saw this so I don't really know the details.)




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