Girasole Receiver Development for Safety of Life Applications

The GIRASOLE Safety of Life Receiver is developed in the frame of the Galileo Joint Undertaking (GJU) Research and Development activities, in the context of the European Commission 6th Framework Programme 2nd call by ALCATEL ALENIA SPACE Italia (AASI), manufacturer leader of advanced, high performance GPS/EGNOS/Galileo receivers for space and safety-critical applications.

Differently from GPS, which relies on an external signal (EGNOS), one of the most appealing features of Galileo is the signal embedded integrity. As this characteristic provides the users with information about the availability and correctness of the Galileo system and signal, Galileo is particularly attractive for all the critical applications that undergo the general name of Safety of Life, or SoL for brevity.

The Safety of Life Services (SoL) are targeted at users who need assurance of service performance in real-time. Typically they are safety critical users, for example Aviation, Maritime and Rail, whose applications or operations require stringent performance levels.

Other applications can be envisaged like emergency and road.

In these types of applications, the receiver plays an important role since is one of the key elements of the safety chain.

The main characteristic of such type of receivers is their capability to detect failures that can come from different sources like the Signal In Space, the environment (ionosphere, troposphere, interference and multipath effects), the constellation etc. and be capable to interpret the integrity information broadcast by the satellites.

In the frame of its 2nd Call, the Galileo Joint Undertaking (GJU) has launched several activities aiming to provide basic technological elements (i.e. receivers) useful for the different services offered by Galileo.

Within this frame, GJU has selected the GIRASOLE project as the one aiming at development of receivers for SoL application. In the framework of the project, Alcatel-Alenia-Space Italia S.p.A. (AAS-I) is leading a Consortium of several companies from eight different countries all over the world.

The GIRASOLE project aims to allow strategic developments of technologies and basic elements of a Safety of life (SoL) Galileo Receiver.

The GIRASOLE system architecture is based on GARDA heritage, a project developed by AASI-Milano under GJU contract (1st call) with the key objective to build an advanced user receiver prototype, configurable to simultaneously track Galileo/GPS/SBAS satellites, supporting all Galileo frequencies and modulations.

The possibility to have Galileo receivers prototypes available at an early stage will provide benefits for standardization and certification of the receivers within each user communities, while facilitating the market penetration of Galileo.

The receiver processes Galileo signals on the L1, E5b bands and GPS/EGNOS signals on the L1 band. It also provides combined Galileo + GPS Navigation solution, Integrity calculations (HMI, critical satellite prediction and Navigation warning) using Galileo and EGNOS Integrity message, interference and multipath mitigation, support to the use of Local Elements and output raw measurements data of each satellite.