Webinar on Resilient Satellite-Based Navigation: Galileo Authentication and LEO Constellations

The objective of this webinar is to present recent developments to make satellite-based navigation more resilient, accurate and ubiquitious. The webinar consists of two parts. In the first one, the description, status and recent results of the Open Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA) scheme of Galileo will be addressed. In the second part, the advantages offered by LEO PNT constellations will be discussed, and specific plans to roll out such a constellation will be described.

The presenters are authoritative contributors to the design of each system.

17h30 - 18h30: Protecting Satnav from within: Signal-in-Space Testing Results and Prospects of Galileo Message Authentication, by Dr. Ignacio Fernández-Hernández from the European Commission (45 minutes + 15 Q&A)

18h30 - 19h30: A New Space Approach to Commercial LEO PNT by Dr. Tyler Reid from Xona Space Systems (45 minutes + 15 Q&A)

Protecting Satnav from within: Signal-in-Space Testing Results and Prospects of Galileo Message Authentication

The risk of faking, or spoofing, GNSS signals is becoming more and more relevant: the likelihood increases as it becomes easier with cheap hardware equipment and open source code; and the criticality increases as well, as the world dependence on satnav grows. The community is finding ways to counteract this threat. These include receiver anti-spoofing techniques and PNT backup systems. However, as of today, the main source of positioning services, the GNSS signals and the data they contain, have no authentication. Galileo, the European satnav system, has developed the first-ever civil authentication service: Open Service Navigation Message Authentication, or OSNMA. It authenticates the navigation message and provides signal unpredictability to make the user position more difficult to spoof. The service has been extensively tested and is nowadays being broadcast worldwide, although not yet operationally. This talk will describe the latest OSNMA specification, including some simplifications of the protocol in its latest, official version. The talk will also present the latest developments, including the main results of months of signal-in-space testing during 2020-2021, and the prospects for the next years. These include the operational service declaration in 2023, and the implementation of spreading code-level authentication mechanisms in the following years.

Dr. Ignacio Fernández-Hernández is responsible for Galileo authentication and high accuracy at the European Commission (DG DEFIS), where he started and led the development of Galileo OSNMA and HAS. He is an engineer from ICAI, Madrid, and has a PhD from Aalborg University in Electronics Engineering. He also has an MBA from LBS. He has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, GPS Lab, and is currently a visiting professor at KU Leuven, where he teaches GNSS.

A New Space Approach to Commercial LEO PNT

We present a novel concept for a New Space approach to commercial satellite navigation, one architected to meet the Position, Navigation, and Time (PNT) needs of demanding critical applications, including autonomous vehicles. This concept leverages the ecosystem which has enabled the Mega Constellations including SpaceX, OneWeb, Telesat, and Amazon. These factors comprise orders of magnitude in cost reduction in access to space with reusable launch vehicles along with new techniques in high volume satellite production. The latter has led to the added benefit of a healthy supply chain of off-the-shelf space-capable components. The Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) constellations of GPS, Galileo, Glonass, and BeiDou represent marvels of engineering as well as immense undertakings by nation-states to support government needs. By standing on the shoulders of these giants, the proposed commercial PNT concept leverages the best of the old and the new. The commercial constellation is designed for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to utilize Mega Constellation satellite buses, components, and launch systems intended for that regime. Satellites are designed for flexibility and with a 5-year lifetime, allowing for faster refresh cycles to keep pace with ever increasing commercial PNT demands. To achieve the required performance and reliability, we introduce a distributed architecture which leverages an interconnected lightweight space segment along with enterprise ground station services to achieve GNSS independence. It combines familiar signals with novel ones for new capability and added resilience, including stronger, spectrally diverse signals with encryption and authentication for civil users. We discuss a staged roll out plan to first deliver GNSS augmentation as a steppingstone to the ultimate constellation delivering full, independent PNT. We conclude with a small satellite mission concept to be launched in 2022 to demonstrate the proposed concepts.

Dr. Tyler Reid is a co-founder and CTO of Xona Space Systems, a start-up focused on GNSS augmentation from Low-Earth Orbit. Previously, Tyler worked as a Research Engineer at the Ford Motor Company in the localization and mapping for self-driving cars. He has also worked as a software engineer at Google and as a lecturer at Stanford University, where he co-taught the GPS course. He is a recipient of the RTCA’s Jackson Award. Tyler received his PhD (2017) and MSc (2012) in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University, where he worked in the GPS Research Lab.

Click here for the web version.

Date and Time

Date: 30 Nov 2021
Time: 05:30 PM to 07:30 PM
All times are Europe/Madrid