Galileo Europe's Global Satellite Navigation System
Written by CHRISTIAN BOURGE
AFTER MUCH DISCUSSION AND SOME NEGOTIATION WITH THE UNITED STATES, EUROPE HAS LAUNCHED GIOVE, THE FIRST SATELLITE IN ITS GPS-LIKE CONSTELLATION.
Showing an almost American sense of sovereign economic and technological determinism, the European Union in December launched the first of 30 satellites that will ultimately constitute Europe’s own proprietary global satellite navigation system, known as Galileo.
Given the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) already works quite well throughout the world, the idea appears at first glance to be driven by the basic universal bureaucratic ideal that more is better. However, a closer look at the plan reveals solid economic and technological goals that do not threaten the U.S. system nor American military concern, but will certainly challenge its place as the premier global satellite navigation technology.
Originally opposed by the U.S. military, EU officials and corporate backers of Galileo say the deployment of a European answer to GPS should not be seen as an attempt at creating a direct competitor.
Hans Peter Marchlewski, general counselor for the EU’s Brussells-based Galileo Joint Undertaking told Military/ DHS Intelligence Galileo is not a competitor for GPS in a market sense although it aims to more than double the satellite navigation coverage of GPS across Europe.
“There is an agreement between the United States and the European Union on the calibration of Galileo and GPS,” said Marchlewski. “Both will work together … to share frequencies between both systems.”
The European Commission (EC), the governing body of the European Union, agreed to start the development phase of the Galileo program in 2005, setting up the Galileo Joint Undertaking to oversee the European Space Agency’s (ESA) development of the satellite system in coordination with private firms. It has subsequently backed a plan to fund the program with a total of 1.6 billion Euros in taxpayer funding, about $2 billion. The remaining two-thirds of the 3.6 billion Euros ($4.3 billion) expected cost for development and launching the Galileo is coming from the private companies developing the satellite system, its operations systems and other ground-based components.
Marchlewski and other proponents of the system say European hubris is not driving the echoing of existing technologies, but rather the program aims to expand and improve on existing satellite navigation capabilities.
Galileo is being designed from the ground up as a technological update and complement to GPS and Russia’s Global Orbiting Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS). The expressed goal is to bolster the marketplace for consumers and companies alike while serving end users in ways the Europeans view the Pentagon-controlled and globally-dominant GPS system falls short.
GPS, as a rule, functions very well and is already in use around Europe for mobile telecom, transportation and in other key sectors. But Marchlewski and other proponents of Galileo point out GPS is financed, driven and run by the U.S. military and was originally designed with military needs in mind.
In a first for the European Union, Galileo will be deployed and operated by a private civilian consortium, which is building the systems under the first ever concession for a public-private undertaking by the multinational group of nations. The end result will be the first time the European Commission will own a pan-European infrastructure system.
Jean-Claude Dardelet, vice president for European affairs and Galileo program manager for Alcatel Alenia Space, the head contractor for the consortium building Galileo’s satellites and ground-based systems, told MDI GPS fails to meet the needs of all markets, and a good deal of Europe.
“It has been designed and deployed for precise goals,” said Dardelet. “There are two frequencies for civilian use. Here we have found the opportunity to design a system according to market needs.”
For example, Galileo’s system of 27 operational satellites, and three active spares in case of failure, will orbit at 56 degrees latitude in three circular medium earth orbits at 23,616 kilometers from Earth. This placement will provide coverage as high as 75 degrees latitude, allowing Galileo’s navigational signals to reach beyond the North Cape in Norway, considered the northernmost extremity in continental Europe.
Dardelet also stressed that for the end user, future global positioning receivers will receive signals from both GPS and Galileo.
The use of both systems will provide great advantages. More global positioning satellites means more chances to get precise information directly and movement away from the sort of enhancement system the EU is currently implementing to better GPS and GLONASS signals in Europe.
The EU is currently deploying a system called the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service, or EGNOS, which is the governmental body’s first venture into satellite navigation. A sort of precursor to Galileo, the system will remain an integral part of Galileo once the more advanced global satellite system is up and running, providing a solid base for deploying Galileo’s ground segment around the world.
Designed essentially to amplify and work as a check on United States and Russian military satellite systems, EGNOS consists of three geostationary satellites and a broad network of ground stations that transmit a signal verifying the accuracy of positioning signals from the two existing global satellite positioning systems.
A joint project of the ESA, EC and Eurocontrol, the European organization for air safety and navigation, EGNOS is designed to allow European users to determine their position to within 5 meters compared with the current 20-meter limit and aims to increase reliability for critical applications such as maritime or aircraft navigation.
“We are at the beginning of EGNOS as much as we are at the beginning of Galileo,” Dardelet said.
EGNOS’s signal, already deployed, will be fully available by the middle of 2006. According to Marchlewski, existing test signals have so far been accurate to 1 meter horizontal and 1.3 meters vertical.
Dardelet noted that in urban areas today, the viability of a satellite-based signal is 50 percent, an important statistic when you take into account that 70 percent of road traffic in Europe is urban traffic.
“This ratio, already thanks to EGNOS, goes from 50 percent to nearly 70 percent and with Galileo it will reach 97 percent,” he explained.
Among the services Galileo is expected to offer are a free open service, a separate guaranteed commercial service, a searchand- rescue service that allows for push-ofbutton alerts to emergency personnel, and a publicly-regulated service for fire, police and other public protection services.
The system is also expected to be incorporated into European military needs. Given that Galileo is designed to work with GPS, it appears unlikely the system will replace existing warfighting systems outright, at least in the short term. Military satellite navigation technology is likely to follow the same path as its civilian counterpart and take advantage of the precision two complementary satellite navigation signals could provide.
Nevertheless, civilian use is obviously the paramount concern of the EU. In all, 10 Galileo frequencies will be made available for public use, allowing for frequency diversity unattainable with the two public frequencies provided under GPS.
Such diversity will allow for a multitude of public and private sector uses as envisioned by the EU, including anti-collision systems, traffic management and better realtime updates of the movement of goods and travelers.
“If we want to meet all these mass markets and address market need, there was really a need to address diversity,” said Dardelet.
There is also the issue of GPS’s precision. Although GPS was designed to purposely distort civilian user positions by anywhere from around 15 to 20 meters, Galileo will contain no such scrambling and will be accurate to within around 4 meters.
Beyond the technical aspects, there is clearly a degree of European pride driving the development of Galileo.
“There is the magic word of independence and sovereignty,” said Dardelet. “Europe willing to rely on its own infrastructures for its economic needs.”
The United States and European Union reached an agreement last year on signal interference, security and other issues related to the two systems working side-by-side, but the Pentagon raised initial significant barriers, including concerns about the safety of having such an accurate system readily available to the public.
In a February 2004 statement to the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, the U.S. Joint Chiefs said Galileo put U.S. military enhancements to GPS “at risk”—a likely reference to the scrambling technology along with potential for frequency interference between the systems.
But in April of last year, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs, Air Force General Richard B. Myers, told the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee that progress in negotiating with the European Union on Galileo had lead to the June 2004 agreement that Galileo’s signal structures would “cause no harm” to U.S. military GPS. He added that international working groups were hashing out the signal interaction issues.
“There was resistance, but this is over,” Marchlewski said. “Since we started the discussions, they stopped their resistance and they started to work with us. I don’t hear about problems since the agreement was signed.”
For his part, Dardelet said that the Pentagon had cause to give the EU a hard time over Galileo’s development, but the fact is it is a civilian system built by Europeans, not a U.S. government-run system.
Nevertheless, he echoed Meyers comment that the June 2004 agreement “pretty well tackled” any potential problems by establishing clear security parameters in the event of intrusions, malfunctions or other security dangers.
Six non-EU nations China, India, Israel, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine have joined the Galileo program hoping to benefit from the technology. Discussions are also underway with Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Norway, Chile, South Korea, Malaysia, Canada and Australia to become member nations.
The impact a civilian run and massmarket oriented system will have on the global marketplace appears to not have been lost on some at the Pentagon.
An October 2005 report from the U.S. Defense Science Board Task Force on the future of GPS recommended the strong promotion of “true civilian interoperability” between GPS and Galileo as well as for the U.S. government to be, “prepared to consider alternative means of funding and governance structures better to sustain international support for GPS.”
As to the U.S. civilian technology sector, Dardelet noted that there is market expectation and clear demand from the U.S. with a number of American firms expressing interest in Galileo, particularly from the mobile telephone and transportation sector.
The December launch of the first Galileo satellite, the GIOVE A (Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element) will be followed by the GIOVE B in spring 2006. The entire system is scheduled to be operational by the end of 2010.
GIOVE A was produced by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. and launched aboard a Soyuz rocket at Baïkonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The initial device includes critical atomic clock and Galileo-specific navigation signal technology.
This initial satellite will provide the first signal broadcasts over two parallel channels and tests of related technologies such as Swiss-designed rubidium clock.
GIOVE B will follow its predecessor following completion of its final tests at an Alenia Spazio factory in Rome, Italy. The second device was developed by the Alacatellead consortium—including Alcatel Space Industries of France, Alenia Spazio of Italy, Astrium GmbH of Germany, Astrium Ltd. of the United Kingdom and Galileo Sistemas y Servicios of Spain—known collectively as Galileo Industries. A total of eight companies across Europe are leading the development efforts.
The second satellite will add a simultaneous three-channel transmission to Galileo’s broadcast along with a passive hydrogen maser clock.
Two separate ground-based centers are to be built to control the satellites, which will link via a global network of 10 C-band uplink station along with five S-band stations. Navigation data will be culled by a global network of 20 sensor stations charged with computing the integrity of the signal and synchronizing the satellites with ground-station systems.
Over the 20 years the Galileo satellite system is scheduled to be in use, as many as 70 satellites will have to be manufactured with an average lifetime per satellite of 12 years.
Alcatel is also the prime contractor for the EGNOS satellite rely system, overseeing the activities of 50 companies in 11 countries.
The next step for the private companies involved is the finalizing of contracts, a process that could take months.
“This will be the next challenging phase,” said Dardelet. ”We will discuss all the dirty subjects of profitability.”
Price Waterhouse Coopers estimates the annual cost over the planned 20-year operation of Galileo will reach €220 million ($266.6 million) each year, money slated to come from the companies running the program. The funds are expected to come from revenue streams related to commercial operations.
“The concessionaires will sell signals, will sell services, will sell applications and business plans shows that after a couple of years there will be a revenue to be shared with members states of EU,” said Marchlewski.
“I promise in a couple of years nobody will live without this highly efficient time signal,” he predicted. “We will have it on our mobile and satellite navigation. It will have the same developmental impacts as 15 years ago with PCs. Nobody 15 years ago was aware what would happen. Today, nobody can live without their PCs. This will happen also with satellite navigation.”
As to remaining technical hurdles, Dardelet admitted that Galileo represents the first time the EU has placed satellites in such high geospatial orbits, but stressed that it is not the first time it is being done and they have the expertise to ensure the system works.
“You have noticed that Switzerland is in charge of the atomic clock?” he asked jokingly. “This is a good thing, no?” ♦