The initiative comprises three core components: Spirent PNT Alliance, PNT Shopfront, and PNT Resiliency Health Check.

The PNT Shopfront will showcase solutions that aid adoption of resilient PNT and help assure regulatory compliance for critical PNT dependencies.

The Spirent PNT Alliance will bring together companies, academic research partners, and PNT professional and government bodies to develop resilience services for Critical National Infrastructure.

ESA selected Spirent Communications to lead a three-year project to develop tools and frameworks for quantifying and improving PNT resilience.

The initiative will deliver a comprehensive test framework designed to drive measurable resilience in PNT systems for users, operators, and providers of Critical National Infrastructure in the United Kingdom.

The initiative is supported by Element 2 of ESA’s Navigation Innovation and Support Program (NAVISP).

Intentional and malicious disruptions to GNSS are a daily occurrence and are pervasive in the aviation and maritime sectors.

Organizations have lacked a clear way to measure or benchmark PNT resilience prior to this initiative.

Spirent Communications will lead an initiative in partnership with the European Space Agency to increase the resilience of Positioning, Navigation and Timing systems used in United Kingdom Critical National Infrastructure.

The 2023 UK Government report The Economic Impact on the UK of a Disruption to GNSS estimates that a 7-day GNSS outage could cost the UK economy £7.6 billion.

The initiative will support the UK Government’s Resilient PNT Strategy by providing access to quantitative test evidence and operational insights for evaluating and validating PNT systems across essential sectors.

The PNT Resiliency Health Check will enable independent appraisal of GNSS equipment capability against general performance, resilience, and security criteria.

The project has strong export potential and positions the United Kingdom as a leader in PNT resilience testing services.

The Spirent PNT Alliance will include the Royal Institute of Navigation as a strategic partner.

Critical National Infrastructure operators in the UK finance, energy, and telecommunications sectors are increasingly recognizing vulnerability to GNSS jamming and spoofing.

Annual PNT Health Check assessments will help organizations understand dependencies, identify vulnerabilities, and track improvements over time using a technical framework that scores resilience against standard benchmarks.

The ORF recommends that India adopt a Digital Space Sovereignty approach to insulate public services such as education and healthcare from foreign interference.

Dependence on foreign devices for tele-education in remote and border regions could be weaponized through signal jamming or the subversion of educational content.

Adversaries could use software-defined radios to intercept satellite downlinks and replace legitimate educational material with misinformation, deepfake lectures, or political propaganda.

The ORF recommends that India’s central and state governments pivot toward a resilient sovereign mix of digital infrastructure to mitigate satellite-related risks.

Foreign Low Earth Orbit constellations like Starlink provide rapid deployment and high-speed internet but introduce security risks for the education sector.

In a grey-zone warfare scenario, foreign-controlled satellite networks could become a single point of failure if an operator withholds services for political or strategic reasons.

Europe fast-tracked the IRIS² sovereign Low Earth Orbit constellation to avoid reliance on non-European players like Starlink or Project Kuiper for strategic governmental needs.

The ORF analysis states that a lack of indigenous control over satellite communications could lead to strategic, cyber, and social vulnerabilities for India.

Ideological targeting of schools via compromised satellite communications poses risks of psychological and social harm to students.

China has treated its mega-constellations as military-civilian strategic assets since their inception.

The Observer Research Foundation released an analysis in early 2026 about the untethered expansion of foreign Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations into India’s critical social infrastructure.

The ORF analysis highlights potential dangers of integrating foreign, untrusted satellite communications devices into India’s national tele-education framework.

Without indigenous encryption and gateway control, India’s sovereignty, data integrity, and security could be compromised as framed by the Telecommunications Act of 2023.

A 0.003-degree rotation accuracy paired with a robotic arm the size of those already used in space translates to less than a millimeter of movement at the far end.

Voyager Technologies secured a US patent covering its process for manufacturing crystals in microgravity to support optical communications.

Momentus signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA to conduct a rendezvous-and-proximity-operations demo mission on SpaceX’s upcoming Transporter-16 flight.

The Momentus RPO demo agreement will validate multispectral satellite inspection, formation flying, and WiFi-based inter-satellite links.

UK Space Agency awarded contracts to three companies worth a combined $1.1M+ to advance in-orbit manufacturing.

Spacecium’s orbital actuator test demonstrates potential suitability of its technology for precise fueling operations in space.

Future missions using Spacecium robotic arms will aim to demonstrate fuel transfers in space and eventually use a full-scale refueling system.

NASA’s R5-S10 cubesat will launch as a hosted payload aboard Momentus’ Vigoride 7 Orbital Service Vehicle to begin the RPO demo mission.

Spacecium flew an actuator on SpaceX’s Transporter-15 mission in November that achieved 0.003-degree rotation accuracy when tested in orbit.

Spacecium demonstrated technology that endures space temperature swings and high radiation in an in-space demo.

Starfish won a Space Development Agency deorbit-as-a-service contract that marks the first contracted mission specifically for end-of-life satellite disposal services.

Spacecium’s in-space demo aimed to demonstrate that next-generation robotic arms can perform fueling operations as well as assembly.

Momentus’ RPO demo mission on Transporter-16 is expected to launch no earlier than March.

NASA, MDA Space, and DARPA considered orbital refueling schemes in past decades.

Actuators contain and direct the small movements of robots.

The Xihe-2 payload includes a High-Energy Radiation Spectrometer to detect hard X-rays and gamma rays and determine non-thermal electron and ion acceleration sites during flares.

A hypothetical Xihe-4 mission would perform close approaches to the Sun to regularly measure particles.

Xihe-2 has mission objectives that include improving space weather predictions and early warnings for solar ejections.

The Sun-Earth L5 point follows Earth in solar orbit at a distance of about 150 million kilometers from Earth.

The Xihe-2 payload includes a Vector Magnetograph to measure three-dimensional magnetic field vectors and plasma velocities in the solar photosphere using polarized light spectroscopy.

CHASE (Xihe) operates in a sun-synchronous orbit around Earth and images the Sun with an H-alpha spectrometer to study photospheric and chromospheric activity.