GPS World

Tag: Huginn

  • Lockheed Martin invests in Xona’s commercial navigation constellation

    Lockheed Martin invests in Xona’s commercial navigation constellation

    Xona Space Systems, a company developing navigation technologies from low-Earth orbit (LEO), has received investment backing from numerous companies, including Lockheed Martin. Its latest financing round was oversubscribed, bringing the start-up’s total funding to more than $25 million.

    Xona is developing a high-performance commercial satellite navigation network, named Pulsar. Pulsar is a LEO system designed to provide resilient and trusted centimeter-level position anywhere on the globe.

    Within the past year, Xona more than doubled its number of full-time employees, launched its first orbital mission, and signed agreements with major players across the GPS/GNSS ecosystem such as Hexagon | NovAtel and Spirent Federal.

    Image: Xona Space Systems
    Image: Xona Space Systems

    The funding round was led by First Spark Ventures, who is joined by numerous new investors including Lockheed Martin Ventures, SRI Ventures (of SRI International), Velvet Sea Ventures, Gaingels, Airstream Venture Partners and Space VC. Existing investors also continue to show firm conviction in Xona’s accomplishments and market opportunity with participation from Seraphim Space, Toyota Ventures, 1517 Fund, MaC Venture Capital and Stellar Ventures.

    The new capital will accelerate development of Pulsar through several critical design milestones by expanding the team and building out Xona’s new R&D and manufacturing facility in Burlingame, California. This will enable more rapid design cycles and prepare for production.

    Xona’s first demonstration mission, Huginn, was successfully launched in May, and its second mission, Muninn, is planned to launch in 2023.

    Xona Engineer Nick Manglaviti setting up hardware-in-the-loop testing at Xona’s R&D lab in San Mateo, California. (Photo: Xona Space Systems)
    Xona Engineer Nick Manglaviti setting up hardware-in-the-loop testing at Xona’s R&D lab in San Mateo, California. (Photo: Xona Space Systems)

    “Xona’s approach to GNSS is poised to enable a whole new class of robust and reliable solutions in everything from automotive to drones,” said Manish Kothari, managing director of First Spark. “This is a technically challenging problem — a problem the Xona team is uniquely qualified and experienced to address. We are very excited to be part of this journey with them.”

    Xona’s core mission is to enable modern technology to operate safely in any environment, anywhere on Earth. To achieve this in industries such as automotive autonomy, drones and aerial mobility, precise knowledge of location and time is critical, and it must be robust against sources of potential interference or degradation. This is driving a need for global infrastructure that can support the demands of these applications as they continue to expand in both capability and geography.

    “The massive domain expertise of our supporters in everything from scaling global companies to deep technical knowledge of GNSS is both a validation of our team’s capabilities and a catalyst that has been instrumental in our growth and speed,” said Xona CEO Brian Manning.

    “As customer needs evolve, Lockheed Martin Ventures continues to work with companies we believe are on the forefront of emerging technology and that support increasingly resilient, hybrid systems,” said Chris Moran, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures. “We invested in Xona so they can continue to develop and build their commercial system to complement the greater GNSS architecture.”

    “The world would look very different today without GPS,” said Xona CTO Tyler Reid. “The ubiquitous robust precision that Pulsar can provide has potential to make the same level of global impact, not only in present and emerging markets, but we believe this global high precision can also enable entirely new devices and apps that we haven’t even thought of yet.”

  • Xona’s private GNSS satellite passes pre-launch testing

    Xona’s private GNSS satellite passes pre-launch testing

    Xona has completed environmental testing for its upcoming demo mission, a significant step towards realizing its high-performance commercial navigation system

    Xona Space Systems announced that their first in-space demonstrator has been delivered to Spaceflight Inc. for final integration after successfully completing testing and is scheduled for launch on SpaceX’s Transporter 5 in May.

    Xona is an aerospace startup developing a precision navigation and timing system in low Earth orbit. It plans to build an independent high-performance satellite navigation and timing system to meet the needs of intelligent systems.

    Xona’s first demonstration mission successfully completed testing at Experior Laboratories and prepares for launch on a Falcon 9 in May. (Photo: Xona)
    Xona’s first demonstration mission successfully completed testing at Experior Laboratories and prepares for launch on a Falcon 9 in May. (Photo: Xona)

    Satellite navigation systems such as GPS and Galileo are in the domain of major governments (and free to users). Xona said it is part of the new commercialized space movement, using it to bring benefits to satellite navigation and timing.

    Xona Space is launching Huginn, the first of two missions, demonstrating the capability of its Pulsar constellation. Pulsar’s architecture uses small, powerful satellites in low Earth orbit, more than 20 times closer to Earth than GPS satellites, which are in medium Earth orbit.

    Pulsar is planned to deliver high-performance navigation and timing services by combining security and signal designs with Xona’s patent-pending distributed atomic-clock architecture to enable robust precision navigation services from low-cost satellites. Its precision LEO positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) service leverages advances in small satellite technology to provide users with a secure and robust alternative to traditional GNSS.

    Xona’s system architecture utilizes the efficiency of small satellites to provide an affordable global system with more than 10 times better accuracy and 100 times better interference mitigation than legacy systems, the company claimed

    Huginn will transmit the first precision navigation signals from a LEO spacecraft, designed to test and validate the core software and hardware technology that Xona has developed for Pulsar. The mission will also demonstrate the functionality of end-user equipment on Earth and supporting ground systems.

    Huginn is now going through final integration with Spaceflight in preparation for launch on the scheduled Transporter 5 mission in May.

    “We’re thrilled that Huginn has successfully completed its very rigorous test campaign in preparation for launch and are incredibly proud of the Xona team for achieving such a critical milestone,” said Brian Manning, CEO of Xona. “Through this process, we learned a massive amount and will be incorporating these lessons into our second demo mission as well as the production satellites.”

    Following the Launch of Huginn, the Xona team will shift focus to the second demonstration mission as well as the development of the Block I Pulsar system.

    The final Pulsar constellation will consist of several hundred LEO satellites, delivering secure and robust precision PNT services designed to meet the needs of advanced applications such as self-driving cars, precision agriculture and construction, augmented reality, critical infrastructure, and many others.

    “It is inspiring to see what this team has been able to achieve going from a blank slate to orbit in less than a year from the time we completed our ground-based prototype testing,” Manning said. “This is a huge step in the development and deployment of our Pulsar constellation, and we’re looking forward to a very exciting year here at Xona.”

    Xona is backed by Seraphim Space Investment Trust (LSE:SSIT) and MaC Venture Capital, with participation from Toyota Ventures, Daniel Ammann (co-founder of u-blox), and Ryan Johnson (former CEO of BlackBridge, operator of the Rapideye constellation). Follow-on investors also include 1517 Fund and Stellar Solutions.