The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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Galileo runs on Galileo System Time, fixed to an precision of around 10 nanoseconds, which is also required to be kept in strict agreement with the international reference time, Universal Time Coordinated or UTC. This is achieved by continuously comparing GST with the national real time approximations of UTC carried out by France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden. This process means UTC time measurements can also be made available to users to within an designed accuracy of 26 nanoseconds, although in practice Galileo has been able to do better than this – down to about 5–10 nanoseconds.