Javier Benedicto (left) and Giuliano Gatti. (Photo: ESA)
Javier Benedicto, head of the Galileo Programme and Navigation-related Activities at the European Space Agency, accepted the 2018 Satellites Leadership Award and delivered these remarks on behalf of Giuliano Gatti at the 2018 GPS World Leadership Awards Ceremony. Gatti, the space segment procurement manager at the European Space Agency, received the award for his contribution to setting up the Galileo constellation from GIOVE-A and -B precursors through all Galileo operational satellites: Soyuz and Ariane 5 launches, a total of 26 Galileo satellites deployed in 7 years.
On behalf of Giuliano Gatti, I express his gratitude for this award.
After a 20-year career in microwave equipment for satellite application, working in Italy, Canada and the Netherlands, Mr. Gatti started working on navigation satellites at end of the 1990s as ESA Galileo Space Segment Manager.
He went through the initial difficulties of the program, namely the uncertainty on financing and the technical lack of maturity of critical units such as atomic clocks. At the time, joining the Galileo team of the European Space Agency was risky and challenging.
In spite of these issues, he was a key player in the developments of the first two Galileo experimental satellites, GIOVE-A and GIOVE-B, and he was in charge of their launches in 2005 and 2008, respectively, on Soyuz rockets from Baikonour, Kazakhstan.
He then followed the development and launch of the 4 IOV satellites, two in 2011 and two in 2012, from the European space port in French Guyana, on a Europeanized version of the Soyuz rockets. The first IOV launch was actually the first launch with this version of the launcher, and interface and schedule coordination issues were challenging tasks for him.
He then was instrumental for the procurement of the following generation of satellites, the 22 FOC satellites. He struggled to make sure that satellites would be produced and launched in line with the program deployment plan. Another challenge in this phase was ensuring that the adaptation of the Ariane-5 ES rocket to the Galileo satellites would converge in time and comply with all technical requirements.
Under his guidance and responsibility, the 22 satellites were put in orbit with 5 Soyuz launches and 3 Ariane-5 launches. Here the most difficult event was the launch that put two Galileo satellites in the wrong orbit, and the subsequent recovery of the satellite mission. In addition, a number of failures affected some of the in-orbit atomic clocks, and hedrove the investigation that led to the discovery of the root causes and their resolution.
Mr. Gatti then initiated the procurement and production of the follow-up recurring satellites, the so-called Batch-3 satellites. These 12 satellites have stringent schedule requirements and their first launch is planned for late 2020 or early 2021.
In parallel, he contributed to the definition of the next generation of satellites, the Transition Satellites: heavier spacecraft with improved performance and high level of re-configurability and flexibility. They will be the first step moving from the existing first generation of satellites to the second generation. In this phase, his experience and competence have played a fundamental role to arrive at the definition of the appropriate procurement requirements.
After 20 years on the development and deployment of Galileo, being in charge of the launches of 28 satellites, from the first GIOVE-A satellite in 2005 to the launch of the last 4 FOC satellites in July 2018, Mr Gatti will retire in mid-2019.
He is delighted and honored that all his efforts and contributions to develop and launch the Galileo constellation have been recognized in this important GNSS event.
At the GPS World Leadership Dinner and Awards Ceremony in Miami on Sept. 27, 120 VIPs from the international GNSS/PNT community gathered to honor recent significant achievements in four fields: Satellites, Signals, Services and Products.
The honorees, so voted by a panel of their peers, appear below. Also, see our article here.
Their remarks upon receiving the awards will appear in the December issue, along with Future Visions for 2019 by the executive officers of GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou.
Rounding out the evening after speeches, dinner and good conversation among good friends, old and new, was the Smart City Jam! We attempted to replicate, on the carpet of the 14th-floor banquet room, an obstructed urban environment, replete with malicious jammers. And we challenged all comers to “autonomously” navigate to a goal in this hostile environment with remote-controlled rock-crawlers. Details on this as well coming up in December.
Four innovators in the fields of satellites, signals, services and products accepted Leadership Awards for 2018 from this magazine at the GPS World Leadership Awards Ceremony and Dinner on Sept. 27 in Miami. Their remarks at the podium directed the audience of PNT industry and research community VIPs to key challenges for the future.
Satellites
Javier Benedicto, left, accepts the Satellites Leadership Award on behalf of Giuliano Gatti of the European Space Agency, from Phil Froom of Rockwell Collins. (Photo: Melanie Beus)
Kicking off the ceremony, Phil Froom of Rockwell Collins mentioned that “Rockwell Collins and QinetiQ [have] signed an alliance agreement to produce a new family of high-assurance, multi-constellation GNSS receivers for professional and military use. This new family of receivers is aimed to be complementary to the current encrypted family of Rockwell Collins receivers in service across the globe, but allow the customer to select the level of capability and protection based upon operational, political or even financial needs.”
(Photo: Melanie Beus)
Froom conferred the Satellites Award upon Giuliano Gatti of European Space Agency, for his contribution to setting up the Galileo constellation, as Space Segment Procurement Manager, from GIOVE-A through all current operational satellites, a total of 26 deployed in 7 years.
Accepting the Award on Gatti’s behalf, Javier Benedicto of ESA told the crowd about “two moments in his [Gatti’s] professional life that were very beautiful and very difficult. The beautiful moment was January 12, 2006, when the very first Galileo satellite, GIOVE-A, started transmitting the first Galileo signals. The most difficult moment was on August 27, 2014, when we saw that Soyuz rocket deploy our satellites a few thousand kilometers before the intended orbit. We thought, how are we going to recover? Today, the satellites are working, and they will be injected into the constellation in a few months.”
[The full text of remarks by both award conferrers — Leadership Dinner sponsors Rockwell Collins, Harris and Spirent Federal — and award recipients will appear in the December issue of the magazine. Jointly with their remarks directing all in the PNT community to future challenges will appear the Directions 2019 special section: essays by the chief executive officers operating the GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou constellations. Look for it!]
Signals
Joe Rolli, Harris Corporation. (Photo: Melanie Beus)
Joe Rolli from Harris opened by saying “I work with an amazing group in Clifton [New Jersey] that comes together, overcomes challenges, builds our [GPS III] payloads, and provides a system that everyone uses every day. I think we’ve gotten to the point where we can honestly say, almost nothing works without GPS.”
“The challenge that I see [for the future] is to overcome the politics: where do you draw the line between doing what’s right for the PNT solution for the common good and addressing your national security and your own agendas in protecting your own country.”
After further comments, he called Logan Scott of LS Consultiing to the podium to receive the 2018 Signals award. Scott has been, in the words of the person who nominated him for the award, “an advocate for improved civil GPS security, and the inventor of a new asymmetric navigation security paradigm for civil GPS signals that avoids the need for secure key storage in civil GPS receivers and thus allows for widespread adoption in applications without physical security capabilities.”
Logan Scott, LS Consulting. (Photo: Melanie Beus)
Scott spoke about the Chips-Message Robust Authentication (Chimera) for GPS Civilian Signals project, in which he was a key participant. “Chimera can offer security benefits far beyond what you see with data message-signing only.”
“Moving forward, the challenge I offer to you all is this: how can we establish the integrity and truthfulness of position and time reports both locally and remotely to other people and mechanized devices? In a world of autonomous vehicles, crowd-sourced databases and geofenced capabilities and information access, and an insecure supply chain, it is not enough to say, ‘Well, I saw it on C/A code.’ ”
Services
This award, sponsored by Spirent Federal, brought Justin Eldredge to the microphone.
Justin Eldredge, Spirent Federal (Photo: Melanie Beus).
“This year we maintain our position of being first to market with new signals, with the launch of SimMNSA. We’re currently in the final test phase of this new M-code option and it will delivering to several authorized customers by the end of the year. If M-code signals aren’t in the spectrum of testing for you, we offer products that simulate all other GNSS signals, plus a variety of other sensors.”
Eldredge introduced John Raquet, professor at the Air Force Institute of Technology. Raquet was nominated and subsequently voted as winner of the Services award for work he and his team at the Autonomy & Navigation Technology (ANT) Center developed on PNT sensors and systems utilizing almost every available source, including GPS, GNSS, inertial, vision, lidar, magnetic field, pseudolites, radar, terrain mapping, signals of opportunity, star trackers, radio ranging, 3D audio, X-ray pulsars, clocks, and more.
John Raquet, U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology (Photo: Melanie Beus).
“Sometimes I called the ANT the Crazy Idea Factory. We’ve tried lots and lots of things,” said Raquet. “I think I have the best job in the world, because I get to experiment with many, many things, and work with amazing people.”
“This is not the kind of community where you build something once and you’re done, you put it away. This is a growing worldwide enterprise that takes new talent to come in and fill the spots that many of the people in this room have occupied. I’m privileged to see some of the students that we’ve worked with to then go on and fill some of the gaps, really do some amazing things.”
Products
Jade Morton, who herself received a Leadership Award in 2015, introduced the final honor of the evening.
“There’s a community of people kind of like you guys, a few of them are sitting here, who are crazy about the atmosphere. That’s their livelihood. They’re talking about how to use satellite navigation technology to monitor the atmosphere, to provide forecasting and modeling technologies. All of these effects, we [navigation engineers] have done everything we can to filter them out, to make them go away. But this company built a system to analyze the real traits that the atmosphere has imprinted on GNSS signals.”
Jean-Marie Sleewaegen from Septentrio then accepted the Products award, jointly on behalf of his colleagues Tom Willems, Andrew Simsky and Wim de Wilde. The company’s PolaRx5S receiver supports worldwide ionosphere monitoring, providing multi-frequency multi-GNSS measurements with low phase noise, high data rates, and flexible configurations, and enabling many Earth-observing applications ranging from ionospheric scintillation characterization to tectonic movements monitoring.
Wim de Wilde and Jean-Marie Sleewaegen, Septentrio, and Jade Morton, University of Colorado (Photo: Melanie Beus).
Sleewaegen said, “We continue to cherish our close ties with the research community. While most of us dream of getting rid of these error sources and these perturbations, atmospheric research scientists don’t want us to filter them out — they want to focus on them and see them in their full glory! The technology that we developed [to both mitigate and preserve the perturbations] is now at the heart of all of our receivers.”
“With the avalanche of new signals and constellations that we see — in some regions of Asia you can now see more than 60 GNSS satellites — the question is how to absorb, process and use that huge amount of data. All these questions are still not answered and will definitely keep us busy for years to come.”
The GPS World Dinner and Awards Ceremony are held annually at the time of (although separately from and independent of) the ION GNSS+ conference. Nominations for the awards come from a group of 40 industry executives and researchers. A ballot of the nominees is then circulated to a larger group of similar make-up.
The festive evening concluded, after dinner and dessert, with the Smart City Jam!, a group exercise in navigation and obstruction. Details in the December issue.
At the Smart City starting line (Photo: Melanie Beus).Smart City jammers in action (Photo: Melanie Beus).And they’re off! (Photo: Melanie Beus)
Last gasp, struggling to finish in second place (Photo: Melanie Beus).You wouldn’t think that professional navigation engineers would be so enthusiastic about jamming (Photo: Melanie Beus).
Somehow, the team of Leadership Award winners (LOQUATRIO) ended up winners of the Smart City Jam! as well. Smart drivers (or jammers) (or both). (Photo: Melanie Beus).
