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GSAT0220 (GALILEO 24)

European Navigation Satellite (Galileo) · ESA / European Commission

GSAT0220 (Galileo 24), completing the July 2018 quadruple launch, brought Europe's independent navigation constellation to nearly its full planned strength — a program that began in direct response to 1999 Kosovo-era anxieties about GPS dependence and, two decades later, had become genuinely global infrastructure in its own right. Within two years of this launch, Galileo's positioning accuracy for capable receivers had reached better than one meter for civilian users — noticeably sharper than the standard GPS civilian signal most smartphones were still relying on primarily at the time.