ESA's Navigation Support Office is located at the Agency's ESOC Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany. It is a world-class provider of products and services related to global navigation satellite systems, in support of ESA missions, European customers such as Eumetsat and worldwide through its participation in the International Global Navigation Satellite Systems (IGNSS) Services group.
The Facility's cornerstone activity, as part of the IGNSS group, has been the computation and prediction of highly accurate orbit (position) information for the US GPS satellite system, and, now, the European Galileo system.
Based on these computed orbits, timing corrections are computed every 15 minutes for all active satellites in the system network, and for all associated ground receivers.
The accuracy of this data is on the order of 3 cm, corresponding to a timing accuracy of 0.1 nanoseconds. Such enhanced data, which forms the Navigation Facility's core product, is used by a wide range of European and international customers – ranging from national weather offices and satellite operators to universities and geo-science institutes world-wide – for a variety of purposes, ranging from scientific studies to climate tracking.