According to an article published by GPS World, the ESA is telling consumers to expect interruption to Galileo’s navigation signals during the last week of January and all of February while the Galileo Ground Mission makes some improvements. The interruption is expected to last about five weeks, and during that time the accuracy of the navigation information received from the satellites will slowly degrade and may even be replaced by dummy message during some stages of the upgrade. Consumers can check the status of the satellites here.
During the five weeks, there are several changes expected to be made including the migration of Galileo Ground Mission Segment from V 1.2 to V 2.0, the addition of three Galileo Sensor Stations, the addition of one new Galileo Uplink Station and various minor improvements to help increase operability, performance and availability.
The new sensor stations will be located in the Azores in Santa Maria, Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic and Kiruna in the Swedish Arctic. Once these three stations are completed and integrated in the system, Galileo will have 15 stations worldwide. Galileo Uplink Stations will be increased worldwide from four to give with the new uplink station to be located on Papeete, in French Polynesia.
The Galileo system is not widely used in the United States yet, and is maintained and controlled by the European Space Agency. This satellite constellation has undergone numerous successes and setbacks since its inception and currently has six out of 30 satellites in orbit.
