Telespace, a j between Leonardo (67%) and Thales (33%), it was awarded, as the first contractor of a team composed of Italian universities, research centers and industrial companies, the tender of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) for the creation of the “National GNSS Competence Center”.
The Center, hosted at Telespazio's headquarters in Rome, will have the objective of creating a laboratory that will use resources distributed throughout the country, at the locations of the various team members, for the development of new capabilities, solutions and technologies to address current and future challenges in the field of satellite navigation.
The team includes theNational Institute of Metrological Research (INRiM), the Italian Aerospace Research Center (CIRA), Qascom and the National Inter-university Consortium for Telecommunications (CNIT) with the Research Units of the University of Pisa, the Polytechnic of Turin, the University of Padua and the University of Roma Tre.
The “National GNSS Competence Center” will allow the sharing of scientific and technological skills, as well as providing third parties with the capacity to manage complex projects in the field of satellite navigation. The Center will also be responsible for the development of new software for monitoring the performance of GNSS services, as well as testing new receivers. A specific collaborative cloud platform will provide the development software capabilities, which will be used by the various entities participating in the project and by future users of the laboratory.
The distributed form of the Center, in fact, has the objective over time of involving other academic entities, research centers and other industrial entities, with the aim of sharing skills and knowledge to develop new innovative technologies and promote their transfer to the market.
In the field of training, the Center has the ambition to become the national point of reference for the dissemination of knowledge in the field of satellite navigation thanks to the organization of specific workshops and courses both for university students of STEM subjects and for professionals.
GNSS-based navigation services and more generally positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services have long been the focus of major investments and play an increasingly central role in our daily lives and in numerous economic activities, whether related to the world of transport, energy, finance, agriculture or defense and security. The transport sector itself, with the development of autonomous driving systems in the aeronautical (both for airplanes and drones), railway and automotive sectors, is looking carefully at technological developments in the GNSS sector, as it needs increasingly precise, resilient and robust navigation systems.
Telespazio is one of the leading companies in the GNSS field, both through its role in key European programs such as Galileo and EGNOS, and through the development of GNSS applications for civil and government use. Telespazio has built one of the two control centers that manage the constellation and the mission of the Galileo program at its Fucino Space Center in Abruzzo. Both control centers are managed by Spaceopal, a joint venture between Telespazio and the German Space Agency subsidiary DLR/GfR.
