ISRO is working on increasing the coverage of its Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System or NaVIC to 3,000 km from the existing 1,500 km (from beyond the Indian boundary), ISRO chairman S Somanath informed on Tuesday.

During the CSIR Foundation Day event at Bharat Mandapam, Somanath gave a presentation of the space agency’s activities where he informed that ISRO is trying to increase the navigation coverage of NaVIC. Once the coverage is widened, NaVIC will not only work in India but its signals will also be present in neighbouring states or SAARC nations. And it would be a reasonable assumption that this critical service would not be made available to Pakistan by the Indian Government.

NavIC is designed with a constellation of seven satellites and a network of ground stations operating 24x7. Three satellites of the constellation are placed in geostationary orbit, at 32.5°E, 83°E and 129.5°E respectively, and four satellites are placed in inclined geosynchronous orbit with equatorial crossing of 55°E and 111.75°E respectively, with inclination of 29°. The ground network consists of a control centre, precise timing facility, range and integrity monitoring stations and two-way ranging stations.

To widen the coverage, the ISRO will have to launch a slew of new navigation satellites to expand the coverage of NaVIC to the 3,000 km range beyond the Indian boundary.

Currently, the use of the NaVIC system is classified under two categories: Standard Position Service (SPS) for civilian users and restricted service (RS) for strategic users like security agencies and armed forces.

NaVIC supports the needs of long-term security and economic growth of India that involve power grid synchronisation, public vehicle safety, real-time train information system, fishermen safety, geofencing, missile navigation. ISRO is proposing to increase the civil applications of NaVIC for navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), Aadhaar enrolment, geodetic network, Indian Standard Time dissemination, emergency warning system and GNSS-based e-tolling system.

NavIC signals are designed to provide user position accuracy better than 20m and timing accuracy better than 50ns. Also, NavIC SPS signals are interoperable with the other global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals namely GPS (US), Glonass (Russia), Galileo (Europe) and BeiDou (China).