Galileo Archives - usatoday24

It is called Galileo, and it is the backbone of the EU’s technological independence

May 20, 2026 by usatoday24

when you open Google Maps or use any application that requires location services, your phone is connecting at that very moment to a handful of positioning satellites that are orbiting our planet. We commonly refer to this type of technology as GPS, but chances are that of all the satellite constellations your phone connects to, some of them are European, and It is not technically “GPS”. In Spain, many of the times we access the phone’s location we do so through the Galileo satellite constellation, which has been operational for almost a decade. The European Union is strengthening this technology and shielding it from interference for a reason: technological sovereigntysomething that is beginning to appear more and more on the EU political agenda. What is Galileo, and why it is not the same as GPS. Galileo is the European Union’s global navigation satellite system (GNSS), funded by the European Commission and developed together with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the EU Agency for the Space Program (EUSPA). There are four operational global GNSS: GPS (United States), GLONASS (Russia), BeiDou (China) and Galileo, the only one under fully civilian control. According to the European Commission itself, its open service offers an accuracy of one meter, up to four times better than traditional GPS. What the user calls “GPS” on their mobile phone is, in reality, GNSS, that is, a cocktail of signals from several constellations that the chip in your phone combines to fix the position. Your mobile phone already navigates with Galileo, and for years. Galileo began initial services in 2016 and opened to the public shortly after. From 2022, according to EUSPA, all smartphones sold in the European single market are required to be compatible with Galileo. Today there are more than five billion users around the world that connect to this constellation, according to ESA dataand the main chip manufacturers (Qualcomm, Broadcom and MediaTek) integrate Galileo as standard. If you want to know which satellites your phone is currently using, there are applications that allow you to find out, such as GPSTest. Importance for the EU. Galileo does not replace GPSis like a complementary layer that provides a certain strategic autonomy that until recently did not exist in Europe. If we think about it, satellite positioning is today a critical service in sectors such as civil aviation, road transport, agriculture, telecommunications, the E-Call emergency system of cars, financial transactions, etc. The European Commission esteem that approximately 10% of the EU’s annual GDP already depends on satellite navigation, which explains why it has spent more than two decades building its own constellation. Service improvements. Galileo is being strengthened and modernized over time. In December last year, ESA and Arianespace Two Galileo satellites were launched for the first time on board the European rocket Ariane 6This is curious because several previous launches had been carried out with SpaceX’s Falcon 9. There are still four first-generation satellites pending launch, and this year they will begin to be deployed the Second Generation (G2)developed by Airbus Defense and Space and Thales Alenia Space, with fully digital payload, electric propulsion, better atomic clocks and inter-satellite links. In parallel, in July 2025 it entered into operation the OSNMA service (Open Service Navigation Message Authentication), which adds a digital signature to Galileo signals to detect attempts to spoofing (the sending of false signals) in a context in which there is increasing signal interference in conflict zones. In fact, Rodrigo da Costa, executive director of EUSPA, counted that Galileo has become the first GNSS in the world to offer global authentication of its open signals. And now what. What is coming are more satellites, more services and better precision. Galileo’s High Precision Service (HAS), free and available globally, now enables precision of the order of 20 centimeters with compatible receivers (not directly from our mobile). The Second Generation will reinforce robustness against interference and open the door to more demanding applications such as autonomous driving. Cover image | Xataka and ESA In Xataka | Who can do more, Google or seven small Dutch companies together? Europe is on the verge of discovering it

In 2023 someone hacked the GPS signal of 20 planes. The European alternative Galileo already offers an option to avoid it

July 29, 2025 by usatoday24

A pilot Fly on the Baltic Sea When, suddenly, all his navigation systems told him that he was tens of kilometers of his real position, drawing ghost circles on Russian territory. Weeks before, in the Middle East, More than 20 crews They had reported a “total navigation failure”, forcing aerial drivers to guide them blind. They were not technical problems. They were deliberate attacks on GPS systems, known as spoofing or signal supplantation. In this type of attack, a powerful transmitter on land emits false signals that mimic the satellites, cheating the plane to calculate an erroneous position and route. Already in 2012, a team from the University of Texas showed that it was possible Take control of a civil drone through Spoofing. In 2017 there were the first cases with ships passing through the black sea. Today the Baltic and the Persian Gulf are black points where maritime operators and airlines routinely report similar incidents. Europe’s response is already here. Until now, the aviation sector has avoided a catastrophe thanks to redundant systems and the expertise of the pilots. But The threat is real, it is growing And you need a robust technological solution. Therefore, the Galileo constellation, the European GPS, has just officially activated its Osnma service: An additional security layer that hinders this type of deception without degrading the performance or precision of positioning. How Osnma works. The Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA) is a kind of digital authenticity seal available for free For Galileo users. In essence, it is a cryptographic protocol that introduces authentication data into the signaling system itself. Specifically, in the I/NAV message of the E1-B signal; An already reserved space, hence it does not affect service performance. The process to have a compatible receiver is to obtain the cryptographic public key from the GNSS European Services Center. Upon receiving the signal, the receiver uses that key to verify the “digital signature” of the message. If the firm is false or does not exist, the receiver knows that he is being a victim of a hoax and can alert the pilot or the autonomous system. Prevents the Spoofingnot the Jamming. Osnma makes supplanting a Galileo signal exponentially more difficult. However, it does not prevent the Jammingthat is, someone interfere with the signal through a brute force attack That the receptors saturate. It is good news equally: it is no longer enough to issue a false signal; The cryptographic firm in real time, an immense computational feat should also be falsified. OSNMA will not only serve to Increase security in air and sea traffic management. It will also be key to the future of autonomous cars, smart tacographers and road use systems. Even for sectors such as telecommunications, energy and finance, which depend on an ultra -precise time signal to synchronize their operations. Image | ESA, Euspa In Xataka | The GPS has become the Achilles heel of modern aviation. And engineering already has its sustained ready

Galileo Galilei of the 21st century is an unknown man who has discovered more moons than no one is going to discover

July 29, 2025 by usatoday24

If they asked you about an astronomer, you would probably think of Copernicus or Galileo Galilei. Maybe Carl Sagan came to mind. If they add “to be alive,” you might answer Neil Degrasse Tyson or, in the event that you are a fan of Queen, Brian May. The name that would hardly come out in the conversation is Scott S. Sheppard, an astronomer as prolific as unknown. The number 1 in yours. Yeah Cristiano Ronaldo He is the greatest scorer in the history of professional football, Scott S. Sheppard is the CR7 to discover objects in our solar system. In total, he has put his name in more than 200 planetary moons: 78 of Jupiter, 119 of Saturn, three from Uranus and three of Neptune. Practically half of all known planetary moons. A record that, as points out Iflscienceprobably will never be overcome, and he has continued to swell it in recent months. The true king of Jupiter. In April, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) confirmed the discovery of two new moons in Jupiter, raising the official total giant to 97. Their provisional names are S/2017 J 11 and S/2017 J 10. Both are small moons and with retrograde orbits, that is, they revolve in the opposite direction to the rotation of the planet, something common in the outer and smaller satellites of Jupiter. And yes, he has discovered them Scott S. Sheppardthat with these two new findings, he adds almost 80 moons of Jupiter to his credit. To put it in perspective: Galileo discovered the first and largest moons of Jupiter in 1610. Since 2000, Sheppard has overwhelmingly dominated the search for Jovian satellites. What is resisting: Planet 9. He extensive curriculum Sheppard looks more like the index of an astronomical atlas than to the discoveries of a single person. In addition to natural satellites in Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptunethis astronomer of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC has also discovered 23 minor planets, six candidates for dwarf planets, three comets that bear their name (Sheppard – Trujillo, Sheppard – Tholen and Trujillo – Sheppard) and The most distant object ever observed In the Solar System: 2018 Ag37 “Farfarout”, about 130 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. This is where your work becomes even more fascinating. Many of his discoveries are transneptunian objects such as 541132 Leleākūhonua “The Goblin”. And it is no accident. Sheppard and his colleague Chadwick Trujillo found them while looking for something much bigger: The hypothetical planet nine. Themselves proposed in 2014 The existence of a superstraier -type distant planet to explain the strange orbits grouped from objects such as the Minor Sedna planet. Image | Carnegie Science In Xataka | What types of satellites exist: guide not to get lost in a gigantic network of which we are increasingly dependent

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