Researchers from team of the National Time Service Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NTSC) detected an abnormality in the system time of Galileo satellite navigation system (hereinafter referred to as the Galileo system) on December 14, 2020, and the abnormality lasted about 3 hours.

The team monitored that the Galileo system time information broadcast by all satellites had irregular jumps from 0:00 to 3:00 UTC on December 14, 2020 (8:00 am – 11:00 am Beijing time). Taking UTC (NTSC) as a reference, the curve of Galileo system time (GST) relative to UTC (NTSC) is shown in the following figure.

Time Bias of UTC(NTSC)-GST(Image by NTSC)

The system time abnormal period will affect the Galileo system navigation, positioning and timing functions. The final impact of the system time exception on the system will be further analyzed by the research team.

This research team is responsible to monitor and evaluate the time performance of the navigation system, analyze the system time performance of GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and Beidou satellite navigation system, and give the deviation from UTC (NTSC).

CONTACT:

XIONG Tiantian

gjhz@ntsc.ac.cn