![\"ESA](\"https:\/\/cdn.satnow.com\/news\/exp_638049482247460985.png\")
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ESA\u2019s Navigation Directorate has planned an in-orbit demonstration with new navigation satellites that will orbit just a few hundred kilometers up in space, supplementing Europe\u2019s 23 222-km-distant Galileo satellites. Operating added-value signals, these novel so-called \u2018LEO-PNT\u2019 satellites will investigate a new multi-layer satnav system-of-systems approach to deliver seamless Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) services that are much more accurate, robust, and available everywhere.<\/p>\n
Global in coverage, and free for everyone to use, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) such as Europe’s Galileo have already transformed our society, and due to their sheer omnipresence, their influence continues to grow. In 2021, the population of satnav receivers reached 6.5 billion receivers around the world and the sector is projected to maintain a 10% annual growth rate in the years ahead. But in various respects the standard GNSS approach is nearing the limits of optimum performance \u2013 to get even better, added ingredients are becoming essential.<\/p>\n
\u201cSatellite navigation has enabled a vast range of applications in recent years, but this very success is inspiring still more demanding user needs for the coming decade,\u201d notes Lionel Ries, Head of ESA’s GNSS Evolutions R&D team, overseeing the Agency’s LEO-PNT studies.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor use cases such as autonomous vehicles, ships or drones, robotics, smart cities or the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) for control of factory systems, the positioning requirements are growing from the current meter-scale to centimeter scale or even more precise, based on continuously reliable signals that are available anywhere, anytime \u2013 even indoors \u2013while able to overcome interference or jamming.<\/p>\n
\u201cUp until now the classical solution of GNSS such as Galileo, located in medium Earth orbit and based on L-band signals, has been what we rely on for our positioning. Standard GNSS alone is not going to be able to fulfill all these future user demands. Instead, Europe needs to seize the opportunity to investigate the potential of the kind of low Earth orbit (LEO) constellations that are already on the way in the global market to enable new kinds of Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) services.\u201d<\/p>\n
Simply by virtue of physics, with less of a distance to cover down to Earth, the signals from these LEO-PNT satellites can be more powerful, able to overcome interference and reach places where today\u2019s satnav signals cannot reach.<\/p>\n
And by adopting novel navigation techniques and a wider range of signal bands the satellites can address particular user needs: for instance at lower orbits the satellites themselves move more rapidly relative to Earth\u2019s surface \u2013 think of the International Space Station at 400 km that orbits the Earth every 90 minutes \u2013 which offers a possible advantage in the time needed to reach very accurate positions. Also, some bands could offer greater penetration in difficult environments while other bands could offer higher robustness and precision.<\/p>\n
The purpose of ESA\u2019s plan to perform an in-orbit demonstration of low Earth orbiting satnav satellites is precisely to consolidate the types of signals, enabling technologies, and their potential for future services.<\/p>\n
The plan is to build and fly an initial mini-constellation of at least half a dozen satellites to test capabilities and key technologies, as well as demonstrate signals and frequency bands for use by a follow-on operational constellation, in the same way, that Europe\u2019s GIOVE test satellites paved the way for Galileo. Success will place European industry in pole positions for follow-on commercial undertakings, as well as planned institutional programs.<\/p>\n
\u201cEach individual satellite would be comparatively small, below 70 kg in mass, compared to a 700 kg current Galileo operational satellite,\u201d adds Roberto Prieto-Cerdeira, Galileo Second Generation Satellite Payload Manager, and LEO-PNT project preparation manager as part of ESA\u2019s FutureNAV program.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey can be comparatively more streamlined because they can benefit from other means to calculate the accurate time without extremely precise atomic clocks on board \u2013 including relayed signals from the Galileo satellites above them. These satellites would also be built on a rapid batch production basis to save time and cost \u2013 we are targeting three years at the most from signing the contracts to the first satellites in orbit, the same kind of timescale achieved by GIOVE-A in the early 2000s.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is ESA\u2019s ambition to ensure Europe maintains a world-class space industry, and navigation today forms the single largest downstream space sector, worth about \u20ac150 billion annually and growing at the rate of 10% per year,\u201d comments ESA Director of Navigation Javier Benedicto-Ruiz. \u201cStanding still is not an option; instead we need to explore new technical avenues to spur European competitiveness and commercialization.\u201d<\/p>\n
An operational version of the LEO-PNT constellation would represent a whole new layer for PNT delivery, combined with traditional GNSS as well as 5G\/6G-based positioning on the ground, and fused with data from sensors in the user terminals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ESA\u2019s Navigation Directorate has planned an in-orbit demonstration with new navigation satellites that will orbit just a few hundred kilometers up in space, supplementing Europe\u2019s 23 222-km-distant Galileo satellites. Operating added-value signals, these novel so-called \u2018LEO-PNT\u2019 satellites will investigate a new multi-layer satnav system-of-systems approach to deliver seamless Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) services that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[72,44,38,43,20],"class_list":["post-9034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-global","tag-gnss","tag-leo","tag-pnt","tag-satellite"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9034"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9034\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}