First Positioning Results Using Galileo Announced

July 17, 2012 - By GPS World Staff

A team of Canadian and German researchers have obtained precise three-dimensional positions using measurements from the four prototype Galileo satellites now in orbit.

The two In-Orbit Validation (IOV) satellites launched in October 2011 joined the two Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element (GIOVE) satellites launched in 2005 and 2008, forming a mini-constellation. For a few hours on certain days, signals from all four satellites could be received by state-of-the-art multi-frequency, multi-constellation GNSS receivers. The researchers used the GIOVE plus IOV satellite observations made by a Trimble Navigation NetR9 receiver operated at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Canada, together with precise orbit and clock data derived from observations collected on the COoperative Network for GIOVE Observation (CONGO) to obtain receiver positions converging to an accuracy of a few centimeters.

An article describing the researchers’ procedure and results obtained will appear in the September issue of GPS World.