Turn off the whole world with one button: what happens if the GPS stops working

Satellite navigation is responsible for making the modern world work. Many of us are not even aware of all the (numerous!) options for its use. At the same time, this system is very vulnerable - and the more vulnerable it is, the more advanced it is. If something happens, what can replace it? Tells Air force.

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When in the summer of 2019, Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv suddenly began to experience a GPS malfunction, only the skill of air traffic controllers helped prevent serious accidents. The interference, which created difficulties for flights for three weeks, according to the Israel Defense Forces, arose due to the work of electronic warfare equipment used by Russia in Syria.

In relation to the Israeli international airport, this, of course, happened unintentionally, but it shows how dangerous such failures in the global positioning system, known to all as GPS, can be.

“We are increasingly aware that GPS must be protected, strengthened and expanded,” says Todd Humphreys, a satellite communications systems engineer at the University of Texas at Austin (USA).

Many of our daily tasks now depend on GPS.

In its simplest form, the system tells us exactly where on the planet the GPS receiver is located - at any time of the day or night. Such receivers are found in our mobile phones and cars. They, playing the role of a kind of modern lighthouse, allow ships to navigate a route among reefs and difficult channels.

Emergency services rely on GPS and similar national systems (such as Russia's GLONASS, Europe's Galileo, or China's Beidou) to find those in trouble.

But the application, which not everyone knows about: ports would not be able to work without satellite navigation, because their cranes need GPS to find the right container.

Satellite navigation systems play a critical role in logistics operations by helping to deliver goods and services accurately and on time. Without these systems, store shelves would quickly become empty and prices would rise higher.

The construction industry uses GPS to survey construction sites, and fishermen use it to comply with strict fishing regulations.

However, GPS, like any other satellite navigation, is about determining not only the exact location, but also the exact time. There are 30 satellites circling Earth orbit that use ultra-precise atomic clocks to synchronize signals. These satellites help users tell time to within 100 billionths of a second.

All mobile networks use GPS time to synchronize their ground stations, and financial institutions and banks rely on it for their operations.

As you can see, without satellite navigation, our life would simply stop. But is there something that can replace the same GPS? Could we have done without her?

According to the London School of Economics, commissioned by the British government, just five days without satellite navigation will cost the country more than £ 5,1 billion ($ 6,5 billion).

Due to the failure of the GPS system, the American economy, according to experts, will lose one billion dollars a day, and if this happens in April and May, when farmers are planting, then up to one and a half billion a day.

And yet, GPS glitches are surprisingly frequent. The military is often the culprit in some parts of the world when testing new equipment or conducting exercises. The US government also regularly conducts tests and exercises leading to the loss of satellite signals. Some technical problems also affect the operation of satellite systems.

Of course, in addition to GPS, there are other similar systems that we mentioned above - they all work on the same basis as GPS. At the same time, with the development of technology, the likelihood that someone will interfere with the operation of these systems and deliberately create interference, or even turn it off completely, increases.

The military is particularly concerned about this, says Professor Charlie Curry, a researcher at the Royal Institute of Navigation and founder of the British company Chronos Technology, which, among other things, deals with synchronization problems in satellite navigation systems.

The military has a lot to worry about. Satellite navigation was originally developed by the Pentagon and is now used on everything from warships to surveillance drones, from smart bombs to foot soldiers. And this system is in danger.

GPS jammers are easy to buy online. Criminals can use them to disable tracking systems for stolen cars - without caring at all about who else might suffer from it.

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But there are more serious dangers.

“There is a remote threat that the entire network of GPS satellites could be disabled as a prelude to war, as an attack on a critical piece of infrastructure, on the US economy,” Humphreys warns.

But the forces of nature can be just as dangerous. The so-called Carrington event, the most powerful geomagnetic storm in recorded history in 1859, could disable the entire current GPS satellite network.

So, if GPS and its satellite sisters suddenly fail, what alternatives do we have? What will help our world start working again?

One possible backup system is a new version of the land-based radio navigation system LORAN (Long Range Navigation), which was developed during World War II to help navigate Allied ships crossing the Atlantic. Instead of satellites, they used ground-based transmitters with antennas on 200-meter-high masts transmitting radio navigation signals.

Initially, LORAN was accurate to within a few miles, but by the 1970s it was able to provide locations with an accuracy of several hundred meters.

In the 2000s, when GPS made LORAN unnecessary, its transmitters were disassembled in Britain and other countries, but the modern version known as eLoran may be as accurate as GPS. It uses advanced transmitters and receivers as well as so-called differential equalization.

This version is said to be capable of determining location with an accuracy of 10 m or even better. Unlike GPS, its signals can penetrate building walls and tunnels, primarily because the system uses a lower frequency with more power than satellite signals.

eLoran's signals are much more difficult to interfere with, and it doesn't rely on vulnerable satellites. The only problem is that someone has to finance its deployment.

“eLoran is a great technology that will fill all the gaps in navigation,” says Humphreys. “If only there are serious intentions to deploy it and maintain it in working order.”

There are other approaches that do not require additional infrastructure. Long before the invention of radio, sailors found their way through the ocean by following the sun and stars - they used a sextant to determine the height of the Sun and other space objects above the horizon in order to find out their geographical coordinates.

Navigation by the stars is still alive today. You might be surprised, but ballistic missiles like the American Trident still use this kind of navigation in flight.

The stars will help determine your location on the planet with an accuracy of one hundred meters. But the American company Draper Laboratory has developed a new generation of stellar navigation system called Skymark - it uses a small automatic telescope to track (in addition to stars) satellites, the ISS and other objects orbiting the Earth.

And since there are so many such fast-moving objects now, Skymark can achieve much greater accuracy than is possible with “slow” stars.

Skymark uses a database of visible Earth satellites - both working and space debris. The creators claim that the accuracy of the system is 15 meters, which is close to the results of GPS.

Sometimes the accuracy can be even higher, but it depends on the number of visible satellites at the same time, on their size, emphasizes Benjamin Lane from Draper.

One of the downsides of Skymark is that it works in clear skies. Of course, using infrared rays, which pass through clouds and fog more easily, helps, but not much. In some regions of the northern and southern hemispheres, where thick clouds are quite common, the system is not as useful.

Perhaps closer to the beginning of effective use is inertial navigation, which uses accelerometers and gyroscopic devices to determine the exact speed, direction of movement and calculate position.

Some basic versions of this system are already in use. “When your car disappears into a tunnel and you lose GPS signal, it's the inertial navigation that continues to guide you,” Curry explains.

The problem with this navigation is that it has a "skid" - the calculated position becomes less and less accurate as errors accumulate, so the inertial navigator in your car is only useful during short periods of loss of GPS signal.

The problem of “skidding” will be overcome by quantum sensors, which are thousands of times more sensitive than existing devices.

French company iXBlue is using them to create a device that rivals GPS in accuracy, and scientists from Imperial College London, in collaboration with laser specialists at M Squared, showed a prototype of a portable quantum accelerometer in 2018.

Such quantum sensors still exist only in laboratories, and it will take years before they turn into a finished product.

But the optical navigation system, which uses video cameras to use landmarks on the ground (for example, buildings or road junctions), may well be put into operation soon. The first version, Digital Scene Matching (correlation of the radar display of the terrain with a reference mapping program), was developed for guided (cruise) missiles.

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ImageNav, created by Scientific Systems for the US Air Force, is an advanced optical navigation system for aircraft. To determine the position, it accesses the terrain database and compares it with information received from video cameras. ImageNav has been successfully tested on various aircraft, but it may well be suitable, for example, for self-driving cars.

The Swedish company Everdrone recently carried out the first drone delivery without GPS. Their system uses a combination of optical navigation (measuring speed by how quickly the landscape on the ground changes) and object identification on the ground, plotting a route from point to point with GPS accuracy.

Of course, this method relies on a complete and accurate base of terrain images, which requires a lot of device memory and frequent updates.

In the UK, the National Time Center program is being developed - the world's first national service designed to support the GPS system in the matter of time synchronization.

When it is introduced in 2025, it will use a variety of high-precision atomic clocks located in guarded locations throughout Britain, providing accurate time signals over cable and radio.

The idea is that if the satellite signal is interrupted, then the backup system will not have any single and therefore vulnerable center that can be disabled either accidentally, or due to a technical problem, or through a cyber attack.

In the grand scheme of things, no single system can replace a navigation system as powerful as GPS, and we will likely use different alternative solutions for different situations—ships, planes, cars.

The US Department of Transportation has announced a competition for the best GPS fallback. But the question is whether such an alternative can start working quickly enough.

“We know there's a problem, but we're moving at a snail's pace,” says Curry.

We are becoming more and more dependent on accurate navigation. Self-driving cars, drone-assisted delivery, flying taxis are expected to become a familiar part of the terrestrial and celestial landscapes in the coming decade. They will all rely on GPS.

Curry points out that a single person with a powerful satellite jammer could disable GPS in an area the size of London if applied from the right place.

Until adequate backup systems are developed, life in the whole metropolis can be stopped literally at a click.

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