Last Year a Race, This Year Quo Vadis?

March 10, 2010 By: Alan Cameron

GNSS came in for a self-examination at this year’s Munich Satellite Navigation Summit, the prime institutional and political venue among the assorted technical conferences dealing with satellite navigation. The 2009 conference was titled “The GNSS Race,” but this year it is “GNSS — Quo Vadis?”

The Latin means “Where are you going?”

A scattering of highlights from the opening plenary and first morning’s session (these will be followed by more detailed reporting in coming days):

Paul Verhoef, program director, EU satellite navigation programmes, of the European Commission said the long-awaited Galileo signal-in-space interface control document should be released “in the next few weeks.”
Anthony Russo, director of the U.S. National Space-Based PNT Coordination Office, said “Keeping cards close to the chest in a competitive situation can well become a liability, creating a future need for a re-work or undoing if you paint yourself into a technological corner.” This seemed to refer to China and its Compass system; information has been singularly difficult to obtain on almost every aspect of this budding constellation and its signal and frequency plans.
China sent 16 delegates to the conference, a record showing. Two of them spoke in the Tuesday morning opening session, in a panel on program updates, though what they provided in the way of update was not much.
Rene Oosterlinck, director of the Galileo program for the European Space Agency, spoke about the danger of space debris, abandoned satellites that now number in the thousands.