Why optical technology for navigation

As the demand for positioning, navigation and timing services continues to grow, there is an increasing need for robustness, resilience and accuracy. Optical technology, particularly intersatellite optical links, offers the foundation for an almost fully autonomous global navigation satellite system (GNSS).

The use of laser beams has the potential to provide additional resilience and robustness at system level, reducing reliance on space atomic clocks and ground segment. Optical links are also immune to jamming and spoofing by nature.

Thanks to the high data transfer rates, intersatellite optical links also have the potential to enable new, more robust architectures, supporting a multi-layer system of systems approach to navigation, in line with the vision of the ESA’s LEO-PNT programme.

In addition, the superior precision offered by optical systems is expected to improve the performance of current navigation systems by an order of magnitude—reaching millimetre-level spatial accuracy and picosecond-level timing, ultimately enabling better services to benefit billions of users around the world.