E-GNSS SPOTLIGHT: The UK’s Satellite Applications Catapult

Dr Chaz Dixon, Technical Director, Positioning, Navigation & Timing at Satellite Applications Catapult

What is the Satellite Applications Catapult and what does it do?

The Satellite Applications Catapult is an independent, not-for-profit, innovation and technology company created to foster growth across the UK economy through the exploitation of space technology. In essence, we help further the GSA’s mission here in the UK by helping organisations make use of and benefit from satellite technologies by bringing together multi-disciplinary teams to generate ideas and solutions in an open innovation environment.

Launched at the GSA-organised European Space Solutions conference in December 2012, it was formally established in March 2013 in Harwell near Oxford by Innovate UK. Today it is one of a network of centres dedicated to accelerating the uptake of emerging technologies and driving economic growth.

          Also read: What Can Galileo Do for Me?

One of our key roles is to inspire others to innovate and support the development of new commercial products and services. Recent innovations are offering new opportunities for SMEs and private enterprise, including the falling cost of access to space, new low-cost satellite constellations, improved usability and accessibility and timeliness of data. These opportunities require new people to engage with the sector to capitalise and develop new businesses and ways of working.

Can you give us an example of innovatory space applications that use GNSS, in particular Galileo or EGNOS, that the Catapult is involved in?

Currently we are working on the GEMNet project together with Ordnance Survey, the UK’s mapping agency, themselves also experts in GNSS. GEMNet’s ambition is to enable UK industry to create innovative and resilient position, navigation and timing solutions. Its primary objective is to discover the extent and nature of GNSS interference and support industry in developing appropriate solutions that mitigate the effect of this interference upon GNSS receivers.

The project has several objectives including:

• Collating compelling and independent evidence of interference on GNSS receivers by pooling existing knowledge, as well as collecting data during the project
• Developing an early understanding of the impact of interference on GNSS end-users
• Engaging with targeted end-users and industry organisations to join future project phases

The Catapult leads the technical developments and integration on GEMNet and analyses the interference measurement results. Knowledge of these operational results will support focused industry and academic efforts to develop innovative threat mitigations and strategies appropriate to transport, critical infrastructure and many other applications. These threat mitigations include things like the use of Galileo’s multi-frequency services and potentially also the encrypted services of PRS to mitigate spoofing.

As space technology is always evolving, do you see some interesting applications still on the drawing board?

The GNSS sector is continuing the revolution first started by GPS many years ago. The new systems, such as Europe’s Galileo, will bring multi-frequency services and new signals that enhance accuracy and mitigate interference – ultimately improving positioning and timing performance for all users.

        Also read: British space sector looks forward to Galileo

The new encrypted services from Galileo PRS may start a new revolution in services that are still being imagined. If position (and time) reports were intrinsically reliable, what services would be improved? How could banking take advantage of authenticated location and time? How would this improve evidential services? If position could not be spoofed, how would autonomous cars take advantage?

Other exciting strands of development include the evolution of GNSS receivers to adopt multi-system, multi-frequency capabilities to meet real user needs, and the integration of GNSS with other sensors for improved robustness and for indoor operations.

Illegal, Unregulated and Unregistered fishing project (IUU)

The Catapult collaborated with Pew Charitable Trusts to develop a demonstrator platform that utilises satellite acquired data to identify illegal fishing. This led to a joint announcement of Project Eyes on the Seas, which will initially launch a ‘Virtual Watch Room’ monitoring the waters surrounding Easter Island and the Pacific island nation of Palau.

In the 2015 budget, the Government also identified the Pitcairn Islands to become the world’s largest fully protected marine reserve. This monitoring capability and scope is expected to increase rapidly, with potential need for an operational subsidiary to effectively segment the business and create opportunities for spinouts.

Urban Planning Tool

The Catapult has developed a unique Urban Planning Service for Milton Keynes Council, using Earth observation (EO) data to efficiently identify the progress of approved building work. The innovative system provides Milton Keynes with a tool for automating planning validation tasks across a large geographic area using satellite data. This is part of addressing the growing challenge facing UK cities around economic development and sustainability.

Recognising an opportunity to make better use of satellite data to address its urban planning activities and reduce the high resource impact previously needed to identify progress of approved building work, Milton Keynes approached the Catapult to provide independent expert advice and support needed to harness EO data as a valuable information source. Through its Data Discovery Hub, the Catapult can easily identify and access a broad range of satellite data that can be used for evidence-based decision making, information gathering and environment monitoring.

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