GALILEO: four new satellites launched successfully

GALILEO: four new satellites launched successfully
26.07.2018 spaceopal-GmbH

GALILEO: four new satellites launched successfully

Four new satellites belonging to Galileo, the European satellite positioning and navigation programme, were successfully launched from the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The launch took place on July 25, 2018 at 8.25 local time (13:25 CET) with an Ariane 5 ES launcher.

The orbiting operations of the 4 satellites will take 14 days and will be managed by the Early Orbit Phase Operation Control Centre of CNES in Toulouse. With this launch, the number of in-orbit satellites in the Galileo System rises to 26.

The GSA, the European GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) Agency is responsible for the Early Orbit Phase of this mission, overseeing Spaceopal – an equal joint venture between Telespazio and DLR-GfR – in their role as Galileo Service Operator and Early Orbit Phase Mission Director.

More specifically, Spaceopal is directly involved in managing operations for the tenth mission (L10) planned in the Galileo Programme, having provided four mission directors to the Mission Control Team.

The Galileo System began Initial Services on 15 December 2016 and Spaceopal is actively supporting the completion of the system to expend the services up to full operational capability by 2020. More than 400 million devices are using Galileo today.

Spaceopal is responsible for managing the entire Galileo satellite system and its performance: in particular, for the operations and control of the system, the network, its security, logistics and maintenance of the systems and infrastructure, the user support services.

Spaceopal carries out these activities through the two Galileo Control Centres in Fucino (in Italy) and Oberpfaffenhofen (at the DLR site near Munich), as well as the GNSS Service Centre (Madrid) and a network of sites and stations distributed around the globe and connected by the Galileo Data Dissemination network.

GO GALILEO!!!