An extension of the Monitor Project has been notified by ESA to IEEA on 30 june 2014. This extension is planned to last two years and it will support the EGNOS project.
New stations will be deployed, some of them including a bitgrabber, with a main interest in the West African countries and the high latitudes region. Asecna company, based in Dakar will participate to the deployment and to the local support. In addition, The French Space Agency (CNES) Sagaie project with Thales Alenia Space as contractor, will join this project which will become the most important for this activity in the western African sector (from Senegal to Chad and Ethiopia). The network will be made more dense in some places allowing a refined analysis and the derivation of ionosphere structure parameters. Furthermore new collaborations are being set up with the South African Space Agency (SANSA) and a deployment in Namibia and with Boston College.
The project will support EGNOS identifying and analyzing those events potentially leading to a decrease of performances. Scenarios will be built both for the TEC variability and the scintillations. An updated GISM version (see software section) will be developed and made available to industry for system assessment.
The Preliminary Design Review (PDR) meeting (T0 + 2 months) was hosted by Thales Alenia Space in Toulouse on September 23th 2014.
