Noori Bni Lam, ESA’s radio navigation engineer, explains: “In the context of antennas, a lens is a plastic ball that can focus or bend radio waves, just like an optical lens does for light.

“We focused on a specific type of lens – called the Luneburg lens – which is spherical and made up of layers that have different densities. The outermost layers are the least dense, while the core is the densest.”

“Because the lens is symmetrical by nature, it can steer a signal beam coming from the antenna underneath it in almost any direction, making the antenna capable of receiving signal from any satellite,” adds Lionel Tombakdjian, research engineer at Université Côte d'Azur in France. During his PhD research project with ESA’s Navigation Laboratory, he explored ways to make this technology cheaper and easier to manufacture.

“While a Luneburg lens is not specifically designed to mitigate jamming and spoofing, its inherent beamforming properties naturally provide a degree of resilience in certain interference scenarios,” mentions David Gomez Casco, ESA's navigation systems engineer.