PARIS (ESA PR) — Acting on behalf of the European Commission, ESA has signed two contracts for an overall amount of €1.47 billion, to design and build the first batch of the second generation of Europe’s Galileo navigation satellites.

Following an intense process of open competition, these contracts have been awarded to Thales Alenia Space (Italy) and Airbus Defence & Space (Germany) to create two independent families of satellites amounting to 12 Galileo Second Generation satellites in total.

Boosting the positioning performance and real-time operability of the system

CANNES, April 15, 2021 (Thales Alenia Space PR) – Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%), as prime contractor for Galileo First Generation’s Ground Mission Segment, has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA), on behalf of the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 Satellite Navigation Program (HSNAV), to develop the Advanced Orbit Determination and Time Synchronisation (ODTS) Algorithms Test Platform (A-OATP). This new contract will support the implementation and experimentation of the navigation algorithms that will be used for Galileo Second Generation.