Xona passes critical testing milestone as private GNSS readies for launch
Xona has completed environmental testing for their upcoming demo mission, a significant step towards realizing the first high-performance commercial navigation system.
“We’re thrilled that Huginn has successfully completed its very rigorous test campaign in preparation for launch and are incredibly proud of the Xona team for achieving such a critical milestone,” said Brian Manning, CEO of Xona. “ Through this process we learned a massive amount and will be incorporating these lessons into our second demo mission as well as the production satellites.”
Xona’s first demonstration mission successfully completes testing at Experior Laboratories and prepares for launch on a Falcon 9 in May. This is the first American private company to launch a satellite navigation mission.
Xona Space Systems, the aerospace startup developing a precision navigation and timing system in low Earth orbit, today announced that their first in-space demonstrator has been delivered to Spaceflight Inc. for final integration after successfully completing testing and is scheduled for launch on SpaceX’s Transporter 5 in May. Xona is building the first ever independent high-performance satellite navigation and timing system designed to meet the needs of intelligent systems.
Xona Space is launching Huginn, the first of two missions, demonstrating the capability of their Pulsar constellation. Pulsar’s revolutionary architecture uses small but powerful satellites in low Earth orbit, more than 20x closer to Earth than GPS, to deliver high-performance navigation and timing services. Pulsar combines modern security and signal designs with Xona’s patent-pending distributed atomic clock architecture to enable robust precision navigation services to be provided from low-cost satellites.
Huginn will transmit the first precision navigation signals from a LEO spacecraft, designed to test and validate the core software and hardware technology that Xona has developed for Pulsar. The mission will also demonstrate the functionality of the end user equipment on Earth and supporting ground systems. Huginn is now going through final integration with Spaceflight in preparation for launch on the scheduled Transporter 5 mission in May. This mission marks a huge step towards realizing a new generation of navigation systems.