RLSP, under the control of the European Commission, with the technical assistance of the French Space Agency (CNES) as future operator of Galileo’s Search and Rescue Service, is the infrastructure responsible for generating Galileo’s return messages and its coordination with the system, which interacts with the Cospas-Sarsat network, on one hand, and with the Galileo ground segment, on the other.

The GMV-primed consortium, also including the French firms PROSICA and AMOSSYS, has already designed and developed the RLSP. The project is now in validation and installation phase in the SAR/Galileo Service Centre, before moving on to the phase of supporting system-integration and -acceptance tests. At the end of January the CNES team came to GMV’s Tres Cantos head office to carry out the Factory Acceptance Test (FAT), which was declared to be a success after four busy days of requirementvalidation and demonstration tests.

After RLSP had come through this test with flying colors, CNES authorized the transfer of part of the equipment to its Toulouse site for conducting the Site Acceptance Test (SAT). During February and March part of GMV’s team has been posted to Toulouse to monitor these tests in situ, with the additional support of GMV’s RLSP team in Toulouse.