ESA’s NAVISP programme is helping invent the future of positioning, navigation and timing beyond current satellite navigation technology. The Agency’s NAVISP Industry Days welcomed a guest speaker from the US government, sharing details of a parallel effort she is overseeing from the other side of the Atlantic.

All satellite navigation is not created equal. Airliners and other safety-critical classes of users employ ‘augmented’ satnav signals, which possess additional precision plus ongoing reliability guarantees. These signals are generated by regional systems based around the globe. The teams responsible for them met recently at Delhi in India to coordinate their future development.

In response to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, ESA’s Directorate of Navigation has shifted to teleworking while also ensuring the continuity of essential tasks, in particular the continued delivery of positioning, navigation, and timing services of the European satellite navigation system Galileo and the augmentation system EGNOS.

The Orion spacecraft that will fly on the Artemis 1 mission around the Moon has returned to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA, after finishing space environment tests. The spacecraft, including ESA’s European Service Module, is now at its final destination before launch.  

While efforts continue to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus on Earth, a space-based experiment called Matiss has been investigating how ‘smart surfaces’ on the International Space Station could stop pathogens in their tracks. 

If you could bring something back from Mars to Earth, what would you choose? This question is becoming reality, as ESA opens a call for scientists to join a NASA team working to determine which martian samples should be collected and stored by the Perseverance rover set to launch this Summer.

Despite challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, teams in space and on the ground have been hard at work over the past month to keep science up and running on the International Space Station.