Navigation Satellites fly at 23,000 km Altitude. Europe Wants to Build a Constellation That Flies Much, Much Lower

It can be difficult to understand distances to different places. The International Space Station is around 400 kilometers from Earth, whereas some satellites, such as Starlink, are closer to the planet. It is usually intentional, as objects in those circles will degrade and burn up in the atmosphere. The Galileo satellites are part of the European Union's satellite navigation network. It has some advantages over lower hanging satellites but also a lot of disadvantages. The EU was going to release a whole new set of satnav satellites.

The advantages are obvious. Galileo and similar systems are not particularly accurate. A few meters one way or another isn't a big deal when you're just using a cell phone navigation app. For applications such as smart cities, the precision has to be on the order of centimeters, not meters.

Satellites are so far away that they can't provide accurate data. Satellites that are brought closer to the ground could allow for more accurate locating of receiving devices and allow for uses in a wider range of applications.

The operating frequencies of large-scale GNSS satellites are not good. The L- band is between 1-2 GHz on the spectrum. In concrete buildings, these bands don't help.

There are a lot of scenarios in the industrial internet of things where a robot would need to know its location. A set of smaller satellites with a broader range of operating frequencies could allow for accurate positioning data from a lower hanging subset of satellites.

Satellite technologies have advanced a lot recently and having the infrastructure of Galileo and other navigation constellations support them would increase their technological advantages. New satellites don't have to have expensive and bulky atomic clocks on them as they can simply receive an accurate timestamp from the satellites above them.

Making specialized equipment for specific frequencies and applications would allow the satellites to clock in at a fraction of the size of a Galileo. Lowering a satellite's launch weight is one of the primary goals of any design team as launch costs are a significant limitation for the commercial adoption of many technologies.

The effort to develop novel systems seems to be centered around commercial applicability. The EU wants to stay at the forefront of satellite system development. The block and the space agency want to remain at the forefront of this fast-growing field of commercial space.

You can learn more.

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