[SatNews]The European Commission has awarded the contract for the development of the Galileo Commercial Service Demonstrator to a GMV-led consortium.

The technology multinational will take on the tasks of developing and testing different CS solutions, including real Galileo Signal In Space (SIS) tests, and facilitating the testing of other solutions by external service providers. This 30-month project has a total budget of 4 million euros. The Commercial Service (CS) is one of the services offered by Galileo, Europe’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), which will provide improved performance and data with greater added value than Galileo’s Open Service and other GNSS signals. It has also been conceived as a potential source of income for the European Union, to offset future operation and maintenance costs of Europe’s satellite navigation systems. GMV, one of the key Galileo development firms, will take on responsibility for the design, development, testing, integration, operation and maintenance of the CS Demonstrator with the overall aim of validating Galileo’s capacity of providing commercial high-accuracy (HA) and positioning-authentication services.

Galileo satellites, artistic rendition courtesy of ESA.

“Authentication” here means the system’s capability of guaranteeing users that they are using original position-calculating signals transmitted by Galileo satellites and by no other source.

“High accuracy” (HA) means the system’s capability of offering positioning services with centimetric precision. State-of-the-art high accuracy techniques, such as those to be tested in this demonstrator, are based on carrier phase measurements and precise satellite position-calculating orbit and clock corrections; they call for no additional infrastructure such as nearby reference stations.

Once the proof of concept phase is over, the demonstrator will be made available as a testbed for potential service providers to validate new commercial services for the community of GNSS users.

GMV has played a key role in the European satellite navigation program Galileo right from the start. This new contract is now to be added to a large number of previous contracts including the supply of several key elements for the system’s ground segment such as OSPF (Orbit & Synchronization Processing Facility), IPF (Integrity Processing Facility), SPF (Service Product Facility), FDF (Flight Dynamics Facility) and MNE (MDDN Network equipment). GMV is also currently the main contractor for providing Galileo’s essential Timing and Geodetic Validation Facility (TGVF) services and is co-leading the development of the European Union’s GNSS service center.

The GMV infosite may be accessed at http://www.gmv.com/