A new activity with GSTP Element 1 and Romania has developed a GNSS receiver based on COTS components that can achieve positioning accuracy to less than 10 cm without trading a loss in robustness.

Called OrbFIX, this GNSS receiver for space can produce high positioning precision in the vital low volume, mass and power consumption required for small satellites. At the same time, it is being produced for low cost, making it affordable despite its advanced technology.

The performed de-risk study revealed that space players are aware of the D4D constraints that one day may be standard rules for Space Agencies. The need to acquire in-flight data is considered of primary importance. However, costs and benefits of in-flight experiments shall be compared. From the analysis conducted by VKI it emerged that recurrent low-cost experiments could be a winning strategy considering i) the intrinsic stochastic nature of the space-debris phenomenon; ii) the reduced measurement capabilities compared to ground experiments; iii) the high risk of a big single experiment.

The study is supposed to provide a wide-spread analysis not only limited to POD concepts, but also investigating the impact of the SSV extension on operational concepts for space users, GNSS software design, and ground operations.

A major challenge in the field of control is to achieve reliable, aggressive, high-speed control of autonomous vehicles. In space, this may involve spacecraft that need to land under harsh conditions, or even – in an extreme scenario – negotiating asteroid debris fields at high speeds. On Earth, the exemplar task that draws most attention currently is high-speed autonomous flight of drones. The application of optimal control on board limited platforms has been severely hindered by the large computational requirements of current state-of-the-art implementations.

The Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) has developed and operated the imagining systems used for navigation and science in the Rosetta and Dawn missions. The objective of this project was to use recent lessons learned and competences acquired from these missions to develop a queue server and external commanding capability for future onboard image acquisition and image processing systems supporting advanced onboard autonomous navigation.

This project was intended to contribute to the implementation of the e-navigation concept (as defined by IMO, Ref. 2.2.6), with primary focus on the navigation in restricted waters, such as harbours, lagoons or regions where the traffic congestion can create conditions for accidents or inefficient operations.

The GREAT project provides an improved test of Einstein's theory of general telativity by analysing the relativistic gravitational redshift as observed in the clock data from GSAT-0201 and GSAT-0202. These satellites have been injected into highly eccentric orbits following a launch mishap, providing us with the unique chance to perform an important test of fundamental physics.

We report on a new test of the gravitational redshift and thus of local position invariance, an integral part of the Einstein equivalence principle, which is the foundation of general relativity and all metric theories of gravitation. We use data spanning 1008 days from two satellites of Galileo, Europe’s global satellite navigation system (GNSS), which were launched in 2014, but accidentally delivered into elliptic rather than circular orbits. The resulting modulation of the gravitational redshift of the onboard atomic clocks allows the determination of redshift with high accuracy.

The basic goal of this project was to analyse how the usage of non-conventional data (i.e. 'data of opportunity') in conjunction with conventional data could help improve the estimation of parameters for weather and space weather. Conventional data it is considered to be data coming from well-known sources such as permanent GNSS receivers (e.g. receivers from IGS or EUREF networks) while non-conventional data is considered to be GNSS data from research vessels or mass-market GNSS receivers (such as smartphones or other single-frequency GNSS chipsets).