Arctic Investigation Underway Into Solar Storm Sat-Nav Disruption 40
another random user writes "Scientists in the Arctic have launched an urgent investigation into how solar storms can disrupt sat-nav. Studies have revealed how space weather can cut the accuracy of GPS by tens of metres. Flares from the Sun interact with the upper atmosphere and can distort the signals from global positioning satellites. The project is under way at a remote observatory on a windswept mountainside in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in the High Arctic. The site was chosen for its isolation from electronic pollution and for its position in relation to the Earth's magnetic field which flows from space down towards the far North."
"Tens of metres" (Score:5, Interesting)
"Tens of metres" is not exactly very precise, and it makes rather a large difference in precision if this is 20 metres or 99 metres: the first is annoying, the second might severely impair your ability to navigate, although I'd question that a bit. I mean, line of sight usually works, and in storms when it doesn't you really shouldn't be navigating close enough to the ground or a potential collision that even 100 metres off would be a dangerous problem, so am I missing something or is not that big an issue? Annoying, yes, and I can see the issue in S&R (gets a lot colder than the -20 mentioned in TFA that close to the poles, hell it gets colder than that here sometimes), but is there any highly important usage case where it would be an extremely detrimental problem?
I'm also a bit curious why they don't just use DGPS [wikipedia.org] anyways, since that exists and it seems like it would solve the problem quite nicely. Added bonus that it helps even when there isn't a solar storm, and it's even more accurate than regular GPS.
Re:"Tens of metres" (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a surveyor, and I use GPS to locate points to within a few hundredths of a foot (a couple centimeters, if you will). So, I don't know if my interpretation is exactly what the article intended, but I saw "tens of meters" and immediately thought "really really bad" and didn't even consider the possibility that the range of variation in "tens of meters" would be significant...
It's interesting how our minds immediately write things off like that... In most other circumstances I think I would have went exactly where you did and asked about the precision.
Something like... if you or I heard that it would cost "several billion dollars" to buy out a particular company, we'd just go "whoa, that's a lot"... but there's a select subset of people who would perk up their ears and say "umm, how much is 'several'?"
Re:"Tens of metres" (Score:4, Interesting)
The company I worked for helped develop ADS-B and was heavily involved in the Capstone Program [wikipedia.org]. ADS-B essentially forms a network between all airplanes and ground stations equipped to send and receive the signal. An airplane periodically (like every few seconds) broadcasts its location and vector so anyone who can receive the signal can tell where the other plane is and where it's heading in relation to it. The GPS that's a part of it also had terrain maps and will warn you if you're headed for a mountain. I'm pretty proud of the work we did on ADS-B. It's improved the safety of flying small airplanes in Alaska immensely and it's coming to the lower 48 States gradually.