The objective of the proposed PNT Traffic Light project is to develop a continuous 24/7 performance monitoring tool for EGNOS/GNSS (and particularly for GPS, GALILEO and EGNOS) on the northern and arctic region of, at least, EGNOS coverage area. In addition to just EGNOS, the tool shall be designed to support assessment of the performance of also other GNSSs (at least GPS and Galileo).

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The problems derived from RF interference (RFI) created by men hand, whether generated intentionally or not, remain as one of the main concerns of the space industry.

This activity investigates how mega-constellations can be used to provide low-Earth orbit (LEO) spacecraft with broadband low-latency services, a novel Concept with potential to disrupt spacecraft design, operation, and performance by allowing spacecraft to access mega-constellations’ enormous resources (Tbit/s throughputs) and global coverage at a lower cost than traditional data relay systems and ground station networks (two to fifty times cheaper, that is, a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per month for a daily net capacity from hundredths of Gbit up to almost ten Tbit).

With the increased frequency of shipping activities, such as tourism and freight’s transport, navigation safety has become a major concern, especially when human casualties, environmental issues and economic losses are considered. Even if new technologies have already supplied aids to pilots for the navigation risk reduction, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) reports that the majority of accidents could have been avoided by providing suitable input to the navigation decision-making process.

Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs) are rapidly approaching market-readiness, with numerous partly-autonomous and teleoperated systems either under development or already performing operational demonstrations for applications such as bathymetric surveying (SEA-KIT Maxlimer, Deep BV), maintenance of offshore installations (Thales Halcyon), and commercial shipping (Yara Birkeland, Maersk VISTULA-Class).

Currently, GNSS is the backbone of most Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) solutions, in providing 24/7 continuous, all-weather, global coverage to an unlimited number of receiver-equipped users. There is an increasing dependency on the availability and reliability of GNSS. However, GNSS is widely known to be vulnerable to an evolving range of threats (natural and man-made, unintentional and deliberate).

New L2 missions like Euclid and Plato will require high data rate reception in K-Band downlink (26 GHz). A new X/K-Band coaxial feed system was developed in a previous TRP activity and it will be deployed in the next years in DSA2 (Cebreros, Spain) and DSA3 (Malargue, Argentina). This feed system architecture will be considered the starting point for the re-design of a new feed system that will allow simultaneous uplink (22 GHz) and downlink (26 GHz).It is intended to trade-off at least two alternative feed system architectures and to perform the detailed design of the selected one.