ESA communication team hands off responsibility to GSA

ESA NAGU team.

After four years of work, the European Space Agency (ESA) team tasked with keeping the world informed on the status of the Galileo satellite navigation system has formally passed on its responsibility to a European Union agency.

This shift is part of a wider transfer of responsibilities, as this month see the official handover of the running of the Galileo system from ESA to the European Global Navigation Satellite System Agency (GSA).

“Our job — working with the European Commission and GSA — has been to inform Galileo users in an official, transparent way of any system changes that could affect Galileo satellites,” explains Rafael Lucas Rodriguez, ESA’s Galileo services engineering manager.

“Keeping our users in the picture on planned activities that might lead to satellite unavailability, or any unplanned outages, has helped them to plan their own test activities around Galileo signals and to prepare future products.”

The very first Notice Advisory to Galileo Users (NAGU) was issued in June 2013, just three months after the first Galileo positioning fix was achieved, to a then small community of researchers and industrial users, interested in making tests with the newborn four-satellite constellation.

A total of 189 NAGUs were issued under ESA oversight in the last four years, as the constellation grew to its current 18 satellites. The user base increased dramatically from 86 to 774 registered users on the European GNSS Service Centre website as companies worked to prepare Galileo-ready products and then, on 15 December 2016, Galileo’s Initial Services began operating.

GSC web portal 2013.

Throughout this period, the NAGUs, published on the website of the European GNSS Service Centre and sent to subscribers via email, gave the user community a reliable overview of Galileo’s overall status and that of individual satellites.

NAGUs are issued as new satellites are launched and when satellites become ready for service provision, or to give advance warning of signal unavailability owing to planned maintenance or testing activities, or to notify users of unplanned outages and then to inform them when satellites become active again.

“Broadcom is a regular consumer of the NAGUs released by the Galileo Service Centre,” says Javier de Salas, R&D Director at GNSS receiver chipset manufacturer Broadcom.

“Not only do they help us to organise our engineering activities and tests but, more importantly, they are used as input into our orbit prediction engine for our Long Term Orbits products, which in turn are used by hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide.”

Rafael Lucas of the ESA team adds, “Around a dozen people at ESA worked to begin defining, setting up and operationalising the NAGU process, modelled after the well-established Notice Advisory to Navstar Users of GPS.

GSC web portal 2017.