BEACONSAT BEACONSAT-Austria's first military satellite

Austria is breaking new ground in space. BEACONSAT is the largest satellite ever developed in Austria and also the country’s first military satellite. BEACONSAT is designed to detect and analyze jamming and spoofing attacks on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). This refers to targeted attempts to interfere with and manipulate navigation signals such as GPS or Galileo. Austria is thus responding to a security policy development that is no longer abstract, but has real implications for aviation, transport, energy supply, and military operations.
Attacks on critical infrastructure

BEACONSAT project is Austria’s first military-commissioned satellite, developed to detect and analyze global navigation satellite system (GNSS) jamming and spoofing from space.

• Algorithm Portability: The software architecture is derived from the INDALOS, scaling ground-vetted multi-frequency code down to run on space-grade components.
• Sophisticated Threat Profiling: It is specifically tuned to differentiate between basic noise jamming, chirp/sinusoidal sweeps, and complex, synchronized spoofing attacks.
• Multi-Layered Architecture: The payload monitors the raw digital signal stream to expose “invisible” attacks—such as sophisticated spoofing that tricks high-end receivers without altering basic power levels.
• Data Mapping Integration: Captured orbital telemetry correlates with ground tracking systems to generate an actionable, real-time map of global electronic warfare zones.