Construction of the New National GNSS Frame Network of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) has been completed. The new network, built by e-GEOS, will provide up-to-date, high-precision geodetic information via GNSS signals for the scientific community and professional and entrepreneurial operators. E-GEOS is a company belonging to Telespazio (80%) and an investee of ASI (20%).
There are 46 stations distributed evenly across the Italian peninsula that will acquire the signals from GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou and Galileo.
ASI’s GNSS network, which was designed and developed to provide indispensable support for the global geodetic networks—such as the International GNSS Service (IGS) and the EUropean REference Frame (EUREF)—will produce data for the management of the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF).
It will make a variety of products and services possible, such as determining the orbits of GNSS satellites with an accuracy to the nearest centimeter. It will also time-synchronize the satellites to better than one nanosecond, useful both for on-site applications as well as to support satellites equipped with GNSS receivers.
The new network will enable ASI and e-GEOS to intensify and fine-tune the joint scientific and operational development underway for the last 25 years at the ASI Space Center in Matera in the field of meteorology, as well as the study of climate change and space weather.
The ASI Space Centre in Matera. (Photo: ASI)
Specifically, the network will enable the provision to the national supply chain—from research centres to SMEs, universities and major corporations—of products and services useful for developing innovative, high-precision positioning applications, which can be implemented in a wide variety of sectors, such as precision farming.
To contribute to scientific activities, some stations in the new GNSS network have been installed in significant locations where purpose-designed structures are already present.
All the data acquired by the New National GNSS Frame Network will be received, processed and stored at ASI Space Centre in Matera and provided to all interested users.