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GSAT0219 (GALILEO 23)

European Navigation Satellite (Galileo) · ESA / European Commission

GSAT0219 (Galileo 23), one of four satellites in the July 2018 launch, added further redundancy to a Galileo constellation that, by this stage, provided positioning accuracy genuinely competitive with — and in some technical respects superior to — the American GPS system it was originally built to reduce dependence on. By mid-2018, Galileo receivers had become standard equipment in a growing share of new European cars and smartphones, with manufacturers increasingly treating Galileo compatibility as a baseline expectation rather than an optional feature worth advertising separately.