Rejoice! Galileo has now been restored. The European navigation service, which recently had faced a technical glitch lasting more than a week, has now started showing signs of recovery for its commercial navigation and timing services users, although some fluctuations may be experienced until further notice.
The technical incident, according to the GSA (European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency), had originated by an equipment malfunction in the Galileo ground infrastructure, affecting the calculation of time and orbit predictions, and which are used to compute the navigation message. The malfunction affected different elements on the ground facilities.
A team composed of GSA experts, the space industry, the ESA (European Space Agency) and the European Commission (EU), worked together 24/7 to address the incident. The team is monitoring the quality of Galileo services to restore Galileo timing and navigation services at their nominal levels. The GSA has announced that it will set an Independent Inquiry Board to identify the root causes of the major incident. This will allow the EU, as the program manager, together with GSA to draw lessons for the management of an operational system with several millions of users worldwide.
Galileo provides has been providing initial services since December 2016. During this initial ‘pilot’ phase preceding the ‘full operational services’ phase, Galileo signals are used in combination with other satellite navigation systems, which allows for the detection of technical issues before the system becomes fully operational. In the full operational phase, Galileo should function independently of other satellite navigation systems.
Dedicated Notice Advisory to Galileo Users (NAGUs) has been published at the European GNSS Service Centre to inform users on the service impact:
- NAGU number 2019025 on 2019-07-11 14:45 on the potential service degradation;
- NAGU number 2019026 on 2019-07-13 20:15 on the service outage;
- NAGU number 2019027 on 2019-07-18 08:20 on the service recovery.
