The increasing vulnerability of GPS brings to the fore more robust, people-based navigation tools, such as Quantum navigation.
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In late September, a Spanish military aircraft carrying the country's defense minister to a base in Lithuania was reportedly targeted — not by a missile or anti-aircraft fire, but by radio transmissions jamming its GPS system.
The flight landed safely, but it was one of thousands affected by a widespread Russian GPS jamming campaign since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The growing disruption to air traffic and the risk of a real disaster have highlighted the vulnerability of GPS and focused attention on safer ways for planes to navigate the maze of jamming and spoofing, the term for tricking a GPS receiver into thinking it is somewhere else.
US military contractors are developing new GPS satellites that use stronger, smarter signals, and engineers are working to provide better navigation information based on other sources, such as cellular transmissions and optical data.
Another approach emerging from the labs is quantum navigation: exploiting the quantum nature of light and atoms to build ultra-sensitive sensors that could allow vehicles to navigate independently, without relying on satellites. As GPS interference becomes more of a problem, research into quantum navigation is advancing by leaps and bounds, with many researchers and companies now rushing to test new devices and techniques.
In recent months, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Defense Innovation Unit have announced new grants to test the technology on military vehicles and prepare for operational deployment.
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The most obvious way to navigate is to know where you started and then track where you are going by recording your speed, direction, and duration of travel. This approach, known as inertial navigation, is conceptually simple but difficult to execute. Small uncertainties in any of these measurements accumulate over time and lead to significant errors later on.
Douglas Paul, principal investigator at the UK's Centre for Quantum-Enabled Precision, Navigation & Timing (QEPNT), says that existing specialist inertial navigation devices can have a 20km drift after 100 hours of travel. Meanwhile, the cheap sensors commonly used in smartphones produce more than double that level of uncertainty after just one hour.
A more precise version of inertial navigation uses sensors based on the quantum behavior of subatomic particles to measure acceleration, direction, and time with greater precision.
Several companies, such as the American Infleqtion, are developing quantum gyroscopes, which track a vehicle's direction, and quantum accelerometers, which can reveal how far it has traveled.
Later, other laser pulses recombine the atoms and are measured by a detector. If the vehicle has turned or accelerated while the atoms are in motion, the two paths will be slightly out of phase in a way that the detector can interpret.
Last year, the company tested these inertial sensors in a custom-built plane flying at a British military test site. In October of this year, Infleqtion conducted the first real-world test of a new generation of inertial sensors that use a steady stream of atoms instead of pulses, allowing for continuous navigation and avoiding long dead periods.
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Infleqtion also has an atomic clock, called Tiqker, that can help determine the distance a vehicle has traveled. It's a type of optical clock that uses infrared lasers tuned to a specific frequency to excite electrons in rubidium, which then release photons at a consistent, known rate.
