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Satnews Daily
May 29th, 2018

It's About Time ... and Orolia's Atomic Clocks Awarded 26M Euros Contract for Galileo's Global Navigation System


Oralia's respected atomic clock solutions have been selected for the Galileo Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Under contracts totaling 26M euros, Orolia will deliver the most stable, accurate timing solutions available to date building on Orolia's reputation of providing the most precise timing technology for satellite programs. The quadruple clock redundancy designed into each satellite ensures that even if a failure occurs, overall system performance will not be compromised. 
 

Each satellite will carry two Rubidium atomic clocks and two passive Hydrogen Masers. Under these contracts, Orolia will supply its Spectratime Rubidium Atomic Frequency Standard and its Passive Hydrogen Masers physics package for an additional 12 Galileo satellites. These new satellites will reinforce Orolia's world leadership position in the number of active atomic clocks in space, including more than 100 in the Galileo system. 
 
Orolia CEO Jean-Yves Courtois stated that they're honored to continue supporting the European Commission with precise timing for Galileo. These new contracts further emphasize Orolia's position as the world's leading provider of resilient positioning, timing and navigation (PNT) solutions.
 
In addition to serving as Europe's independent PNT source, Galileo can also serve as a secondary signal source for systems such as GPS, GLONASS or BeiDou in the event of service disruption. Galileo delivers the highest accuracy of any GNSS system in operation today. The quadruple clock redundancy designed into each satellite ensures that even if a failure occurs, overall system performance will not be compromised. 
 
More than 150 Orolia Spectratime atomic clocks are flying to support Galileo, IRNSS, BeiDou, GAIA and other missions, some for more than ten years. Orolia provides the expertise necessary to design solutions for highly reliable space applications.
 
Orolia designs and manufactures a full range of high-performance, low cost GNSS synchronized crystal solutions, Rubidium and Maser sources, smart integrated GNSS reference clocks, rugged PNT devices, GNSS simulation and clock testing systems that support applications including defense, government, space, maritime, enterprise networks, aviation and telecommunications.