Last January 26th, 2018, after several months of negotiation, ESA confided officially to Airbus Defence and Space the realization of EGNOS version 3 (V3).
European Geostationary navigation Overlay Service is the European GNSS constellation Augmenting System (with US’GPS, Russian Glonass and Chinese Beidou). Its use allows to locally improve
(i.e. «To augment”) the precision supplied by the GNSS constellations. Aviation is one of few EGNOS users, for the Approach & Landing phases. EGNOS thus shall be compatible with current aeronautical standards (eg. DO-229) to be able to be used in this context where the approximation is not allowed. Main novelties for EGNOS v3 will be the compatibility with the various existing GNSS constellations and the use of the various frequency bands of the latter, which will allow to improve the precision (of both location and time).
CS is part of Airbus Space & Defence consortium and will be in charge of the development of two sub-systems part of EGNOS software core: the PCF (Prediction Chain Facility) and the MCIF (Monitoring and Control Interface Facility). PCF’s role is to compute the corrections (i.e. ionosheric, orbits, …) necessary for the GNSS signal increase of accuracy. This double implication makes
EGNOS v3 a sizing project for CS group. This large-scale project is so going to require near 5 years of development and is going to allow us to become a major player in Navigation / GNSS.