Global Navigation Satellite Systems Engineering, Policy, and Design
The Galileo program is about to launch its eagerly anticipated navigation message authentication service. It will be no panacea but the first step in a gradual process of fully securing one of the fundamental technologies of the 21st century.
By Peter Gutierrez
I strode into the plenary session of the ION International Technical Meeting, primed and ready for a barrage of modernity, of out-in-front advances in precision positioning, navigation and timing. The first thing I saw was a 7-foot tall cesium beam tube, an early atomic clock from the 1950s.
By Alan Cameron
We’ve a long history as a learned society,” Royal Institute of Navigation Director John Pottle told the plenary audience, “solving navigation problems is no longer a simple matter. It’s not all about the technology anymore. What we think we do, uniquely, in the world is to bring different disciplines together who share a common interest in navigation.”
By Peter Gutierrez
A new European Union Agency for the Space Program (EUSPA) will succeed and expand the current European GNSS Agency (GSA), which has been managing the EU’s Galileo satellite system for 15 years.
By Inside GNSS
By Inside GNSSIn lead position on a sleigh rising from the North Pole to a height of 200 meters — standard cruising altitude for global package delivery — at 2100 hours UTC on December 24 — the youngest will hopefully be asleep by then and there’s plenty of territory to cover before dawn breaks, time’s a-wasting — navigator Rudolph will see between 40 and 45 GNSS satellites glistening in the night sky.
The European GNSS Agency (GSA) awarded a contract for the development of the Galileo-based TIming Receiver for CriticAl INfrastructure Robustness (GIANO) to Thales Alenia Space, for resistance against interference, jamming and spoofing.
By Inside GNSS
A version of the NeQuick G ionospheric model algorithm to help single-frequency receivers to estimate and correct for the ionospheric propagation delay is now available for download from the Galileo Service Center (GSC) website). Using a new coding approach, this version is the result of intensive effort by engineers at the EU’s Joint Research Centre.
By Inside GNSS
An innovative positioning engine based on a safety-oriented paradigm uses a dual-frequency GNSS receiver, automotive cameras, accurate maps, low-cost inertial sensors and vehicle odometry. The real-time integrity layer bounds the error of each estimated value with a confidence level for safe navigation.
By Inside GNSS
This summer, French railway company SNCF performed successful tests of an autonomous train, using Galileo-enabled receivers. The vehicle ran a distance of four kilometers with the help of remote control. SNCF intends to develop its own prototypes of autonomous freight and passenger trains by 2023.
By Inside GNSS
The European GNSS Agency (GSA) has just issued its sixth annual GNSS Market Report, a booklet that comprehensively runs down the major market sectors and gives gratifying growth figures for all of them. This is not news, strictly speaking. This is more of the same that we have seen over the last two decades, the last six years of which have been quantified in the sturdy GSA Market Reports.
By Inside GNSS
The newest EGNOS satellite is aloft. Eutelsat’s 5 West B satellite was successfully launched from Kazakhstan on October 9. Among other payloads, the 5 West B carries a GEO-3 payload of the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay System (EGNOS), Europe’s regional satellite-based augmentation system (SBAS). The satellite will support EGNOS V3, the next generation of the EGNOS program.
By Inside GNSS
A live demonstration in the North Sea used the Galileo Search and Rescue (SAR) service to initiate an emergency rescue in three and a half minutes after a “person in distress” operated her Galileo-enabled personal locator beacon (PLB) from a small life raft, adrift on the open water.
By Inside GNSS
The introduction of a new generation of mass-market chips based on multi GNSS dual frequency measurements, already being commercialized and integrated in smartphones by major manufacturers, is contributing to a new level of positioning accuracy in the mass-market location-based services.
By Inside GNSS