Mega-constellations of hundreds or even thousands of low-orbiting satellites offer a means of acquiring continuous coverage for telecommunications services or Earth observation. – THIS
Oct. 27 () –
ESA is planning an in-orbit demonstration with new navigation satellites that will orbit within a few hundred kilometres, complementing the 23 satellites of the Galileo system.
Operating value-added signals, these novel satellites called ‘LEO-PNT’ will investigate a new system approach of multi-layer satellite navigation systems to provide seamless positioning, navigation and timing services that they are much more accurate, robust and available everywhere.
With free global coverage, global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), such as Europe’s Galileo, they have achieved absolute omnipresence.
In 2021, the population of satellite navigation receivers reached 6.5 billion receivers worldwide and the industry is expected to maintain an annual growth rate of 10% in the coming years. But in several respects, the standard GNSS approach approaches the limits of optimal performance: to make it even better, additional ingredients are becoming essential.
“For use cases such as autonomous vehicles, ships or drones, robotics, Smart Cities, or the Industrial Internet of Things for factory system control, positioning requirements are growing from the current meter scale to the centimeter or centimeter scale. even more accurate, based on continuously reliable signals that are available anywhere, anytime, even indoors, while being able to overcome interference or interference,” he says. it’s a statement Lionel Ries, head of ESA’s GNSS Evolutions R&D team, which oversees the Agency’s LEO-PNT studies.
In his opinion, standard GNSS alone will not be able to meet all these future user demands. Instead, Europe needs to seize the opportunity to investigate the potential of the type of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations that are already on their way to the global market to enable new types of positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services.
Simply by virtue of physics, with less distance to Earth to cover, the signals from these LEO PNT satellites can be more powerful, able to overcome interference and reach places where current satellite navigation signals cannot reach.
ESA’s plan is to build and fly an initial mini-constellation of at least half a dozen satellites to test key capabilities and technologies, as well as demonstrate signals and frequency bands for use in an operational follow-on constellation.
“Each individual satellite would be comparatively small, with less than 70 kg mass, compared to a current 700 kg Galileo operational satellite“, adds Roberto Prieto-Cerdeira, payload manager of the second generation Galileo satellite and preparation manager of the LEO-PNT project as part of ESA.
