Galileo: celebrating a year of successful signals
Scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) are celebrating a year of signals from the first Galileo satellite, GIOVE A. The signal transmission has enabled the ESA and the EU, the partners in the Galileo project, to secure use of the frequencies allocated to the system by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). During the past year, the GIOVE team has also been able to verify the satellite's on-board technologies, such as the signal generator, the atomic clocks and the navigation systems. They have also been able to characterise the radiation environment of the Medium Earth Orbit (23,260 km up), in order to better understand how the radiation levels and electromagnetic fields found there could affect the design of the operational system. Overall, the experiments carried out over the last 12 months have confirmed that the service performance can be met and the overall Galileo system design is on track.