Is It Really GPS If It Doesn't Use Satellites?

cartechboy writes: "GPS was originally developed by the military, but today it's in your smartphones, and soon, possibly your watches. Now the British military is developing something called quantum compass. The concept is a GPS-style navigation for submarines that doesn't use satellites. The quantum compass uses the movements of super-cooled subatomic particles to pinpoint a vessel's location. These particles, stored in a vacuum, react to the Earth's magnetic field. The movements caused by this interaction can be used for location positioning. At the moment, the Ministry of Defense's prototype resembles a '1-meter long shoe box,' so the next step is to miniaturize it. It could then be used by individual soldiers, as well as huge ships and submarines. Not only is it useful, but it's secure too—the technology is apparently interference-proof. Is this the future of navigation systems, or the reinvention of the compass? Possibly both."

Comments

Man-portable supercooling?

[GameboyRMH]

Good luck with that.

Re:Man-portable supercooling?

[tippe]

The supercooling is apparently done using lasers, so something that is man-portable is maybe realistic

The DSTL's team was inspired by the Nobel-prize winning discovery that revealed that lasers can trap and cool a cloud of atoms placed in a vacuum to less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero

Re:Man-portable supercooling?

[jellomizer]

Doesn't anyone listen to the Doctor. Whenever the Brits make advanced technology meant to be shared with the world for the common, it is part of some evil plot to take over the human race! Why don't they just call it Asmos.

Well ...

[gstoddart]

Does it provide you with an accurate position on the globe?

As far as I know GPS means "global positioning system", and doesn't include the word satellite.

Re:Well ...

[CastrTroy]

GPS specifically refers to the system created by the US military for tracking your position using a bunch of satellites they put up there. Just because the acronym expands out to something rather generic doesn't mean it doesn't mean a specific implementation. FTP expands out to File Transfer Protocol. That doesn't mean that bittorrent is FTP because it's also a protocol for transferring files. There are other systems like GLONASS that help you determine you position, and also use satellites. But it would be confusing to call them both GPS, because GPS refers to a specific implementation. If you're going to call things that aren't GPS as GPS, then you might as well call navigating by the stars GPS.

Re:Well ...

[NatasRevol]

you might as well call navigating by the stars GPS

That'd be galactic positioning system.

Re:Well ...

[gl4ss]

"Non-Satellite GPS Could Soon Be A Thing"

that's the only fucking thing on the article that refers to it as "gps". other references are "gps like".

if wanting to be a total troll about it, I think it remains to be seen if us military will call this sort of positioning GPS or not.

Re:Well ...

[DougOtto]

No. In Russia, GLONASS uses you!

Re:Well ...

[The Grim Reefer]

This is only true because before the array of satellites deployed by the US military, there was no other system for finding your global position.

Not true. From the Wikipedia entry on the SR-71"Nortronics, Northrop's electronics development division, had developed an astro-inertial navigation system (ANS), which could correct navigation errors with celestial observations, for the SM-62 Snark missile, and a separate system for the ill-fated AGM-48 Skybolt missile, the latter of which was adapted for the SR-71.[50][citation needed]

Before each takeoff, a primary alignment brought the ANS's inertial components to a high degree of accuracy. Once in flight, the ANS, which sat behind the Reconnaissance Systems Officer (RSO)'s position, tracked stars through a circular window of quartz glass set in the upper fuselage.[37] Its "blue light" source star tracker, which could see stars during both day and night, would continuously track a variety of stars as the aircraft's changing position brought them into view. The system's digital computer ephemeris contained data on 56 (later 61) stars.[51] The ANS could supply altitude and position to flight controls and other systems, including the Mission Data Recorder, Auto-Nav steering to preset destination points, automatic pointing and control of cameras and sensors, and optical or SLR sighting of fix points loaded into the ANS before takeoff.[52] Former pilot Richard Graham told an interviewer at the Frontiers of Flight Museum that the navigation system was good enough to limit drift to 1,000 feet off the direction of travel at Mach 3."

I knew a guy who worked on this system. He told me about a time when they pulled one out of a plane for routine maintenance and they thought it was malfunctioning as it locked onto a star while in the hanger. After they couldn't find the fault they put a guy on a lift and turned all of the lights off in the hanger. Sure enough they found a pin hole in the roof that could only be seen close up in the dark. After they patched the hole, everything checked out fine.

Not GPS

[Megane]

Nope.

Sounds like more like an inertial navigation system, but one that uses the Earth's magnetic field instead of just being shaken around.

Re:Not GPS

[timeOday]

It is not clear from the article whether or not this is ultimately an inertial system, but if so it's a huge leap beyond the current ones:

It's a great deal more accurate than the current method used by submariners, which relies on accelerometers to pick up a vessel's movement while underwater. The accuracy difference is enough that a vessel surfacing after a day could be within three feet of its intended position--rather than up to a mile off.

It sounds potentially very exciting. (Yet once again, 99% of the slashdot comments are debating the phrasing of the clickbait headline, instead of talking about the technology itself and potential impacts. It's really disappointing.)

depends.

[gandhi_2]

Are we saying Global Positioning System, capitalized and considered a Proper Noun?
Then, no.

Are we saying global positionin system, a generalized term for systems that give you position data on the globe?
Then yes.

LORAN, EPLRS (when used as it was actually created for instead of a mesh data network), VORTAC, and probably many other systems were all generic positioning systems.

If the earths magnetic field moves (and it does), then won't this system also be affected?

Re:depends.

[arth1]

Are we saying global positionin system, a generalized term for systems that give you position data on the globe?
Then yes.

In that case, we're causing confusion, and should be using the already existing word - geodesy/geodesics.

Using a well-known noun as if it were a generic term causes problems. People who ask what brand of xerox machine you have should be taken out and shot, and so should people who say GPS for other things than, well, GPS.

Light on facts

[Captain_Chaos]

The article is very unclear about how exactly these supercooled atomic particles tell them where they are on the globe. The impression I get is that it's just a more accurate form of inertial navigation. Or perhaps it compares the local magnetic and gravitational fields against some map of the Earth? I don't see how that would be immune to interference though, especially the magnetic part. And it would rely on an extremely accurate magnetic/gravitational map of the entire planet, which would have to be kept up to date as well as both those fields are constantly changing. Sounds very unpractical.

I'll be very interested to see if something comes of this or if it will just turn out to be hot air and/or inaccurate reporting...

Re:Does it give you a position on the globe?

[Missing.Matter]

A map is not a system.

stable magnetic field

[DoofusOfDeath]

I'm kind of surprised that Earth's magnetic field is stable enough for this to work well. Or if nothing else, wouldn't local magnetic field disturbances goof it up?

Re:stable magnetic field

[The Raven]

This is not a compass. This measures the atoms passing through lines of magnetic flux. The magnetic flux lines are remarkably uniform when you are not within range of a competing magnet; I suspect that is just as true underwater. It's like measuring your distance from the center of a record by counting the track grooves you have scratched over. It does mean it's more accurate at east-west than it is at north-south.

Re:Durability?

[Lumpy]

About 3 inches. The GPS satellites transmit signals on two carrier frequencies. The L1 carrier is 1575.42 MHz and carries both the status message and a pseudo-random code for timing. The L2 carrier is 1227.60 MHz and is used for the more precise military data stream

Salt water attenuates 1.5ghz signals quite effectively.

Re:I'm skeptical

[Rei]

I think the emphasis has been misplaced; I think based on the process describe that they're actually measuring the *gravitational* field, which is not readily tampered with. It'd be like navigating based on a topo map, except instead of altitude it'd be using the local gravitational field below the device.

Supercooled superconducting gravimeters can be amazingly sensitive, to the point that one in Finland reportedly detected the increase in local gravity as workmen removed snow from the roof of the building it was housed in ;) If one can make use of tiny diode lasers to supercool a tiny group of particles, it could conceivably yield a low power, portable, super-precise, tamper-immune GPS when combined with dead-reckoning and/or other rough positioning mechanisms to help determine how you're moving over the "topographical" gravity map.

At least that's my take.

Article is lame blogspam. Here's the real info.

[Animats]

Lame article, which points to a blog, which points to another blog, which points to the wrong place on a Russian site, which copied the article from The Daily Mail. The Daily Mail, even though a tabloid, has a halfway decent article.

I'm not going to explain inertial guidance; that's what Wikipedia is for. This is better inertial guidance. Here's a popular article which describes this new class of "gyros" and accelerometers. If you really want to know what's going on here, read Advances in Atomic Gyroscopes: A View from Inertial Navigation Applications

Laser "gyros", which work by interferometery and have no moving parts, have been around for decades. The best laser gyros still have more drift, by about 2 orders of magnitude, than the best mechanical gyros. Laser gyro technology has hit the limits of what you can do with photons. The idea here is to do interferometry with coupled atoms, rather than photons. That technology has been slowly improving for a decade or so, and it looks like it's getting close to deployment for high-end applcations.

One of the more interesting possibilities here is chip-scale gyros of moderate precision. Here's a Honewell patent from 2006 for one.