The commanding officer and a navigation specialist from the US Coast Guard Navigation Center visited the newly built European Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Service Center (GSC) in Madrid, Spain, while heading to a Department of State led US/European Union Bilateral GNSS working group meeting.
The EU is building Galileo, a Global Navigation Satellite System similar to the US GPS, and their GSC has looked at NAVCEN as a model service center for civil GNSS. The talks between the two parties aim to encourage cooperation between the two service centers and NAVCEN.
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The two service centers discussed their roles and respective responsibilities to support civil users of GPS and Galileo, along with how they can improve the sharing of relevant navigation information.
The European GSC shared the results of their first Galileo User Assembly, which is built after the US Civil GPS Service Interface Committee, managed by NAVCEN in collaboration with US Department of Transportation.
USCG noted that sharing methods and ideas for messaging and public notifications for events about satellite constellations is helping Europe’s GSC establish themselves as the GNSS service center for the European continent.
As cooperation increases between the GPS and Galileo services, transparency between the civil parts of these programs is paramount for adequately developing standardization to benefit the world’s users of GNSS signals.