ITRF2020 Updates and Future Perspectives

The International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF) is the foundation for Earth science and operational geodesy applications. It is built on international cooperation over more than three decades for the benefit of countries, regions and global geodesy.  Substantial improvements have been constantly made in the data analysis strategy, at the level of both individual geodetic techniques, as well as the ITRF combination, with the aim to improve the ITRF accuracy and reliability. Motivated by a number of reasons that will be exposed in this paper, the ITRS Center decided to regularly (yearly) update the ITRF2020, with a first update (ITRF2020-u2023) released in December 2024, a second update (ITRF2020-u2024) released in September 2025 and a third update foreseen in 2026. Results of these updates will be presented and discussed, with a special focus on the uncertainty evaluation regarding the stability of the frame physical parameters (origin and scale), as well as Earth Rotation Parameters when adding extended data from the four techniques: VLBI, SLR, GNSS and DORIS. Future plans and perspectives regarding the ITRF2020 updates and consequences for the most demanding user needs conclude the presentation.