Spire Global announced today that they were awarded a $16M contract for the EURIALO project to develop the preliminary design and demonstrator for a global space-based independent aircraft surveillance system.

The project intends to design and demonstrate the viability of a novel system that uses a satellite constellation to track aircraft by determining their exact position based on different times of arrivals of radio frequency (RF) signals.

Today, surveillance systems often rely on self-reported positions of aircraft, which are derived from GNSS satellites. The need for an additional complementary space solution will provide a fully reliable and resilient surveillance solution.

Following the initial design and demonstrator phases, there is a potential opportunity to be selected to build out the full constellation, which would foresee a large number of satellites.