Aireon's initial on-orbit performance analysis of space-based ADS-B

On January 14th, 2017, the first SpaceX rocket launch of 10 of Iridium NEXT's satellites generated an exciting milestone towards the global coverage of Aireon's space-based Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system [1]. ADS-B is a cornerstone technology for the aviation industry that enables significant improvements in aircraft based travel efficiency and safety. Aireon's hosted payload ADS-B receivers have the potential to accelerate and extend the benefits of ADS-B to the entire Air Traffic Management (ATM) community by significantly expanding the boundaries of legacy infrastructure.