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What is Galileo?
Galileo will be Europe's own global navigation satellite system, providing a highly accurate, guaranteed global positioning service under civilian control. It will be inter-operable with GPS and GLONASS, the two other global satellite navigation systems. Galileo will deliver real-time positioning accuracy down to the metre range, which is unprecedented for a publicly available system.
What is EGNOS?
"When you get a GPS navigation signal, how do you know you can trust it" asks Laurent Gauthier, the EGNOS project manager at the European Space Agency. "EGNOS will tell you whether you can trust the signal. It will tell you that you are at a particular spot with a high degree of certainty and definitely within an area enclosed by a circle with the spot at the centre. In effect, it will give you your position and say by how much it could be out."
What is satellite communication?
Satellite communication (sometimes abbreviated to satcom) is an artificial satellite stationed in space for the purposes of telecommunications. Satcom are used for mobile applications such as communications to ships and planes, for which application of other technologies, such as cable, are impractical or impossible.
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The purpose of AFSAGA was to analyse the potential applications that could be open as a combination of Galileo and satellite communications in South Africa and the whole Southern African Development Community (SADC) region which encompasses 14 countries.
South Africa as well as the whole Southern African Development Community area used to be under the coverage of the EGNOS system prototype which is the precursor of Galileo and makes extensive use of satellite telecommunication. EGNOS can easily be deployed again in the region. This would allow Southern Africa to benefit from this signal and enable in the short and medium terms some applications which would not be possible with GPS only. South Africa as well as neighbouring countries have a lot of specificities in the way that it combines urban centres well equipped from a telecommunication perspective together with a large territory with a much lesser telecom infrastructure density making satellite a clear plus towards national development. In addition, Southern Africa is now undergoing an important transformation with rapid development and Galileo combined with satellite applications is clearly an enabler towards sustainable development in the whole SADC region, as well as for the preparation of the 2010 FIFA soccer World Cup.
This project aimed first at developing the awareness for such applications in the Southern African Development Community and capturing from the user communities the applications which bring them the most benefit. Based on these application requirements, the project structured those needs and developed a regional action plan for the removal of barriers for the implementation of such applications both from social, infrastructure and regulatory perspectives. Finally the project disseminated these results both to user communities representatives and to key stakeholders in the Southern African Development Community.
Project Information
The following list contains a short summary of key project data:
- Call identifier: FP6-2005-Space-1
- Project reference: 030933
- Contract type: Specific Support Action (SSA)
- Start date: 01/03/2007
- End date: 01/03/2008
- Project duration: 12 months
- Total funding budget: 281,000 €
- Consortium:
- Thales Alenia Space (France), project coordinator
- Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (South Africa)
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