New multi-year initiative seeks long-endurance unmanned survey platforms to collect high-precision geomagnetic data and enable magnetic navigation across trans-oceanic routes.
The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) has opened a new Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) for the Geomagnetic Airborne Unmanned Survey System (GAUSS), a multi-year, multi-phase effort to build the magnetic reference maps needed to make magnetic navigation (MagNav) an operational alternative to GPS over the world’s oceans. Solution briefs are due 22 January 2026.
The GAUSS project sits squarely in the DoD’s broader push for resilient position, navigation, and timing (PNT) in the face of persistent GPS jamming and spoofing on the modern battlefield. DIU describes GAUSS as a program to demonstrate “magnetic data collection platforms that address warfighter needs for precision navigation capabilities beyond GPS,” calling it a key step toward operationalizing MagNav for national security assets.
Why magnetic navigation needs better maps
MagNav exploits spatial “fingerprints” in the Earth’s crustal magnetic field: by comparing real-time magnetometer readings against a precise magnetic map, a vehicle can estimate its position even when GNSS is denied. Over land, geophysical survey and resource-exploration campaigns have generated reasonably dense data. Over open ocean, however, high-precision geomagnetic mapping is sparse and expensive, leaving large gaps in the reference models needed for operational navigation.
GAUSS is explicitly designed to attack that bottleneck. The RFP notes that current commercial airborne platforms for magnetic data collection are optimized for terrestrial geology, not long-range oceanic campaigns. As a result, they lack the range and cost profile to support million-kilometer-scale surveys at the altitudes and geometries MagNav requires. The DoD is therefore looking for concepts that can be deployed in bulk, flown repeatedly, and scaled rapidly—both at high altitude and near the sea surface—without bespoke, one-off integration work each time.
Data layer first, navigation products later
Unlike many navigation-focused programs, GAUSS is not asking industry to deliver a complete MagNav system. It is asking for the pieces that make MagNav possible:
- Platforms that can be deployed in numbers, from higher-endurance aircraft that can cross oceans to more attritable vehicles suited for high-risk areas.
- Integration approaches that allow COTS and GOTS magnetometers to be added with minimal non-recurring engineering, and with careful control of platform-induced magnetic noise.
- Processing techniques that can turn raw magnetic line data into “navigable products” with tight repeatability requirements.
There is also a clear emphasis on correcting the field itself. GAUSS explicitly calls for techniques to handle diurnal variations and other time-varying effects more than 1,000 miles offshore, whether through space-weather modeling, loitering monitoring assets, or novel approaches. That places space-weather, modeling and signal-processing expertise on equal footing with airframe design.
In other words, GAUSS treats geomagnetic mapping as a layered problem: aircraft, sensors, calibration, environmental correction, and data products that future navigation systems can consume. It is a data infrastructure program that sits underneath whatever MagNav receivers eventually reach the field.
For the PNT community, GAUSS is notable because it shifts the conversation away from narrow “anti-jam” solutions and toward a portfolio strategy. Magnetic navigation does not replace GNSS, but it offers a fundamentally different signal source that cannot be jammed in the same way and does not depend on a satellite broadcast. To make that option real, the government now appears willing to underwrite the most expensive part: building the maps.
A visible commitment to alternative PNT
The GAUSS documentation opens by naming “precision navigation capabilities beyond GPS” as the core need and frames the effort as a multi-year initiative culminating in “mature technology demonstrations” that enable operational MagNav over trans-oceanic distances. Flight testing is expected throughout prototyping, including navigation flight tests using newly collected data.
Taken together, those elements send a clear message:
- The DoD expects GNSS denial and degradation to be a long-term reality, not a temporary aberration.
- Magnetic navigation has progressed far enough that the main barrier is data availability, not basic feasibility.
- Unmanned systems, rather than traditional crewed survey aircraft alone, are viewed as the scalable way to build the required data sets.
As other alternative PNT concepts—from celestial navigation to signals-of-opportunity—compete for attention and investment, GAUSS suggests that magnetic navigation has secured a place in the emerging portfolio, with the data layer now moving to the forefront.
