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The System: Galileo Slips, EGNOS Operates

November 1, 2009  - By

Four Galileo in-orbit validation (IOV) satellites scheduled to launch next year have already missed their first pad date.The European version of Russia’s Soyuz rocket is now scheduled to carry the four IOV satellites into orbit in two launches in November 2010 and early 2011, as announced by European Space Agency (ESA) Director-General Jean-Jacques Dordain on October 9.

Both launches had been set for earlier in 2010, but ESA has encountered difficulties with the satellites, built by a consortium led by Astrium Satellites and Thales Alenia Space. Introduction of Russia’s Soyuz rocket at Europe’s Guiana Space Center in French Guiana, on the north coast of South America, has also been repeatedly delayed.

The European Union and ESA plan to select a builder for the remaining 28 satellites late this year. Final bids from 11 companies bidding for on six Galileo work packages are expected by November 11.

Experimental Satellite Moved. In July and August, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) repositioned GIOVE-A, the first Galileo test satellite, to an orbit 113 kilometers above the orbit that the operational Galileo navigation satellites will occupy.

Since its December 2005 launch, GIOVE-A has achieved all of its mission objectives and remains in excellent condition well beyond its design life of two years, SSTL stated.

The test satellite secured the Galileo frequency filings with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), collected data to characterise the medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) environment, and flight-proved technologies such as highly accurate atomic clocks.

GIOVE-A remains fully operational, and has sufficient propellant remaining for further maneuvers. A further repositioning exercise may be performed to raise the orbit higher still before GIOVE-A is finally decommissioned.

SSTL and its new owner, OHB of Germany, jointly form one of the two consortia now bidding for the development and construction of 28 satellites for the operational Galileo service.

EGNOS. The European Commission (EC) declared on October 1 the official start of operations by the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Servic (EGNOS), with its Open Service available free of charge to businesses and consumers. EGNOS is Europe’s first contribution to satellite navigation and a precursor of Galileo, the global satellite navigation system in development.

EGNOS is a satellite-based augmentation system that improves the accuracy of satellite navigation signals over Europe. The system is composed of transponders aboard three geostationary satellites hovering high above the Eastern Atlantic and the European continent, linked to a ground network of about 40 positioning stations and four control centers, all interconnected. The EGNOS ground stations receive signals sent out by GPS satellites. Information on the accuracy and reliability of these signals is relayed to users via the geostationary satellite transponders. This allows them to determine their position to within two meters in real-time, according to EC spokespersons.

The EGNOS coverage area includes most European states and has the built-in capability to be extended to other regions, such as North Africa and European Union neighboring countries.

The commission seeks to support new applications in sectors such as agriculture (high-precision spraying of fertilizers) and transport (for example, automatic road-tolling or pay-per-use insurance schemes). EGNOS can also support much more precise personal navigation services, both for general and specific uses, such as systems to guide blind people and to improve signal reception in urban areas.

EGNOS will be certified for use in aviation and other safety-critical areas in compliance with the Single European Sky regulation. Through EGNOS a safety-of-life service is expected to be in place by mid 2010. This service will provide a valuable warning message informing the user within six seconds in case of a malfunction of the system. A commercial service is under test and will also be made available in 2010.

EGNOS operations are managed by the European Satellite Services Provider, ESSP SaS, a company based in Toulouse, France, founded by seven air navigation services providers. A contract between the EC and ESSP SaS covers management of the EGNOS operations and maintenance until the end of 2013.

The EGNOS Open Service is accessible, without service guarantee or resulting liability, to any user equipped with a GPS/SBAS compatible receiver within the EGNOS coverage area. Most receivers sold today in Europe meet that requirement. No authorization or receiver-specific certification is required.

GLONASS Signal Generates Slip

A planned late-September launch of a three new GLONASS-M satellites from the Baikonur space center was postponed due to a problem with signals emanating from a previously launched GLONASS-M satellites, now on orbit. Initially, a new launch date of October 29 was set by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, but no word had yet come at press time regarding investigation of a problem with the signal generator aboard the orbiting satellite, detected in late August. The spacecraft was taken out of service on August 31.

GPS Wiggles: SVN49, CNAV

The GPS Wing held an extraordinary session at ION GNSS in Savannah, Georgia, September 23, frankly explaining the SVN 49 satellite’s problem and probable solutions.

SVN49, the IIR-M) + L5 civil-signal satellite, will be set healthy in the coming months and it will be useable, the GPS Wing said. Its L1 an L2 signals contain a pseudorange error that remains within specifications for compliant GPS user equipment.

On the ground, a receiver sees from this satellite both a direct signal and a weaker reflected signal, which looks like a multipath component. According to models, if the direct and reflected L1 signals are in phase at zenith, a standard code-correlating receiver will measure a C/A-code pseudorange that is 1.62 meters too long. The error becomes smaller as the elevation angle drops, reaching zero at an elevation angle of about 42 degrees, and then rising slightly as the elevation angle drops to zero.

During audience input following the Savannah panel presentations, Javad Ashjaee of JAVAD GNSS proposed simply turning the satellite on as is and using it as an opportunity, given the “defined multipath” that it effectively transmits, to study multipath and other phenomena. JAVAD GNSS Triumph receivers have demonstrated the ability to remove almost all anomalies and satellite multipath from the SVN49 signal.

An as-yet-unconfirmed report has it that U.S. Air Force representatives and others, in an informal meeting after the session, came to a provisional agreement as to the best course. However, this has not yet worked its way through channels nor been announced.

New Message. The first test of the CNAV navigation message format to be used in the future on Block IIR-M and IIF satellites was announced at the September CGSIC meeting in Savannah, and will begin soon. A Type 0 message will be broadcast on the L2C signal by SVN49. By the end of the year, this message is to be switched on, on all IIR-M satellites. However, this initial message type will not contain useful information for end users.

Message Type 0 consists of a 12-second, 300-bit long message including the preamble, satellite pseudorandom noise (PRN) number, message type ID (=0), GPS time of week, a sequence of alternating 1s and 0s, and a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) parity block. The GPS time of week will change every 12 seconds, as will the CRC bits.

Penny Axelrad Honored

Penina Axelrad, professor of aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado, received the Institute of Navigation’s 2009 Kepler Award for her “contributions in the field of satellite navigation and dedication to the education of future generations of navigation engineers.”

Axelrad has done advanced research in topics including receiver autonomous GPS integrity monitoring (RAIM), GPS bistatic radar, satellite formation flying using GPS, GPS-based orbit and satellite attitude determination, and multipath characterization, modeling, and mitigation.

She received a Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University and S.B. and S.M. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has taught for 17 years at the University of Colorado.

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